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Is VSCode still fast after you add enough plugins to make it reach feature parity with IntelliJ? I've tried VSCode a few times through the years, but it always

Is VSCode still fast after you add enough plugins to make it reach feature parity with IntelliJ? I've tried VSCode a few times through the years, but it always seemed like I needed at least a dozen plugins to get all the features I have out-of-the-box with PhpStorm. I guess it's a philosophical difference between modular components and a big ol' monolith (though, beneath the hood, IntelliJ IS modular... most of their software is just a branded collection of plugins, though all the major ones are first-party instead of community-driven like in VSCode).

thrownaway561 5y ago
you're comparing a text/code editor with a full fledge IDE. VSCode is _not_ an IDE, it is a glorified text editor with an amazing plugin system. if you need an IDE for what you do, use PHPStorm. I myself still use Visual Studio for a lot of the stuff that I do in .Net as I find I need the features it has.
- unknown_error 5y ago
  I mean, let's be honest, the difference is getting blurrier and blurrier as "text editors" gain more features over time. And workflows, too, aren't that clear-cut... is it wrong for a "text editor" to include built-in autocomplete or git support? What about project-wide regexp search, or is that a better tool for grep? Etc. At the end of the day, I don't care what a program is classified as, only if it can do what I need it to do. Like many here, I've used Sublime for its speed on simple edits and other editors/IDEs for more complex dev work. That's fine. But VSCode occupies that in-between space, offering a mix of performance and features. The holy grail for me would be something like PHPStorm but with better performance. I wonder if Java has something to do with it, vs it being built as a native OS app? I don't remember Visual Studio (the full IDE, not VSCode) being this slow, ever, even on old Windows 95 machines. And even back then it was pretty feature-complete too, especially compared to VSCode if not IntelliJ. I guess my underlying question is whether it's really impossible for an IDE to be both fast and featureful.
zumu 5y ago
I haven't had issues with plugin bloat, personally. A nice feature is you can disable/enable plugins per workspace so you can only load your Java plugins for your java projects, etc.

thrownaway561 5y ago

you're comparing a text/code editor with a full fledge IDE. VSCode is _not_ an IDE, it is a glorified text editor with an amazing plugin system. if you need an IDE for what you do, use PHPStorm. I myself still use Visual Studio for a lot of the stuff that I do in .Net as I find I need the features it has.

unknown_error 5y ago
I mean, let's be honest, the difference is getting blurrier and blurrier as "text editors" gain more features over time. And workflows, too, aren't that clear-cut... is it wrong for a "text editor" to include built-in autocomplete or git support? What about project-wide regexp search, or is that a better tool for grep? Etc. At the end of the day, I don't care what a program is classified as, only if it can do what I need it to do. Like many here, I've used Sublime for its speed on simple edits and other editors/IDEs for more complex dev work. That's fine. But VSCode occupies that in-between space, offering a mix of performance and features. The holy grail for me would be something like PHPStorm but with better performance. I wonder if Java has something to do with it, vs it being built as a native OS app? I don't remember Visual Studio (the full IDE, not VSCode) being this slow, ever, even on old Windows 95 machines. And even back then it was pretty feature-complete too, especially compared to VSCode if not IntelliJ. I guess my underlying question is whether it's really impossible for an IDE to be both fast and featureful.

zumu 5y ago

I haven't had issues with plugin bloat, personally. A nice feature is you can disable/enable plugins per workspace so you can only load your Java plugins for your java projects, etc.