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I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? I had to he

I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? I had to help a developer setup deploys to a dev server from vscode the other day and I wanted to pull my hair out. I'll admit it's at least in part due to not using vscode myself but I was a heavy Sublime Text user which is very similar to vscode when it comes to how you find/configure plugins. I understand that vscode is very powerful and infinitely extendable but I feel like I shouldn't have needed to try 4-5 different vscode plugins (all configured via json) before I found one that worked and did what I needed. At least 2 of the top downloaded plugins when searching for "SFTP" were read-only/archived on GitHub, the top one had a "reloaded" version which was also discontinued from what I could tell. I'm comparing this experience to IDEA which has this built in (including support for deploying to multiple servers at the same time) and all configurable in the GUI. Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky but vscode seems to get unwieldy very quickly (plugin conflicts, not being able to tell what's doing what, writing almost all config in json). The plugin ecosystem seems to be much lower quality that I what I see in the Intellij product line. I guess I'm just not interested in "building my own IDE" and forever tweaking it, I'd much rather buy a product that does almost everything I need in a sane way.

colordrops 4y ago
Totally agree, if I'm gonna put effort into building my IDE it's gonna be vim or emacs. I use nvim most of the time and intellij on occasion for debugging.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Oh, I do the same. Coding in vim and debugging in vscode. The GUI and mouse support is a better experience.
- vultour 4y ago
  Ah, a fellow full-time vim user. There are dozens of us!
- stefanos82 4y ago
  lol, I jump between Vim and NetBeans almost on a daily basis! So it seems I'm not the only one who follows a similar pattern after all.
datalopers 4y ago
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview far better and faster than sftp
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I looked into that plugin but we don't run any special daemon/server for editing on our servers (nor do we want to).
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    Maybe don't edit on a server. Have you heard of git?
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      There is no need to act like this. Of course I've heard of git and we use it, we just don't use local (on the computer we develop on) dev environments, we have a mix of developer-specific VMs and local physical hardware due to the nature of our business.
      - heartbreak 4y ago
        I’d write the SFTP stuff as a script and invoke it as needed via a VS Code task. I have a few workflow-type things like this that I normally do via the CLI, but now I’ve added them as tasks to VS Code for convenience. I can also create the task at the project level and check in the JSON config so that teammates can use those same tasks.
    - seabrookmx 4y ago
      +1 for remote ssh. If you can SFTP to the box you can use this feature. The only possible wrinkle is the developer box needs the build toolchain. If you're writing python, your remote box obviously already has it to run your app. But if you're writing Rust or golang, it's very possible the remote machine doesn't have the compilers.
bckr 4y ago
> setup deploys to a dev server from vscode What does this mean? Setting it up so you can deploy through GUI?
- joshstrange 4y ago
  On save, deploy the file out to a dev server(s) that runs the full stack (1 or more server per developer that only they use).
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    It sounds like your development flow is a bit unusual nowadays, which could explain why no one bothers to maintain such vscode plugin.
    - bckr 4y ago
      I have to agree. I'd rather open the terminal and do a git push or otherwise run a command rather than having every save get deployed.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. It just turns out they aren’t better in every way, and possibly not in the ways that matter. VSCode plug-ins just have more eyeballs and work done on them for various ecosystems, for example. Especially for less common languages and features.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. I would expect the opposite to be true. I could be wrong but it seems like the free editor that's mentioned in lots of tutorials would be the one newer developers gravitate to over a paid tool like IDEA.
- indymike 4y ago
  > Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. It just turns out they aren’t better in every way, and possibly not in the ways that matter. Almost every junior I hire has only used Atom, Sublime or VS Code, especially JavaScript developers. >VSCode plug-ins just have more eyeballs and work done on them for various ecosystems, for example. Especially for less common languages and features. The reason to switch to an IDE from something more flexible like VSCode or Emacs is the amount of time spent keeping the editor working.
  - tristan957 4y ago
    VSCode has been working just fine for me for the last 5 years. Not sure what you mean by "keeping it working." I program in C/C++, Rust, Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Java. Never had a problem that made me bang my head against the desk.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    > The reason to switch to an IDE from something more flexible like VSCode or Emacs is the amount of time spent keeping the editor working. An editor will generally not stop working like a car without oil. But, IDEs may stop working due to more complex configurations and disparate use cases.
csours 4y ago
I use IDEA and VS Code and Notepad++ and ... I'm kind of surprised you did a deploy from VS Code. I would have assumed there was another tool for that. I do most of my git and ssh/scp stuff from the command line because I'm never quite sure what the tool will try to do to "help me out"
- joshstrange 4y ago
  For myself it's all about reducing the delay between "writing code" and "seeing the results". Dropping down to scp or run a script to deploy files seems like an unnecessary delay/break in my development process that I don't like adding in. If you can develop 100% locally this isn't an issue but we can't (or haven't taken the time to do so). Think of the dev server as just a VM running locally and it might make more sense.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Why not pop out an integrated terminal and execute commands there? It's still within the editor and you could have a shell script that runs to deploy.
    - joshstrange 4y ago
      It all comes back to that "development cycle" and wanting to make that as short as possible. What you suggest is absolutely fine, it's just my personal preference (and something that I've seen help other devs) to make the "write code"->"see results" as tight as possible. If you add any delays, any potential chance of forgetting a step, etc then it breaks my programming flow which can kill my productivity.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        But aren't you executing a task either way? Either running a script, or executing a command through Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P, you have to do something to deploy. I mean, hell, just set up gulp/grunt/another task runner to watch your files and run scp if you want it continuously running? Why involve your IDE at all at that point?
rychco 4y ago
I personally use CLion for all my C/C++ work, even preferring it over Visual Studio proper. It handles the environments, builds, build systems, etc for me a so I can focus on programming. VSCode is what I use for everything else (mostly Python, Golang, Web stuff) when I don't need the IDE overhead.
tomca32 4y ago
I switch back and forth between IntelliJ products and VSCode. As a pure editor I prefer VSCode. It's fast and has a great plugin ecosystem. Another great feature is that it's config is just a JSON file that I can put into git and push it to my dotfiles repo making it easy to share config on all of my machines. However, there's just some functionality in IntelliJ that I miss in VSCode like running tests. Of course there are plugins but they are all clunky and don't give you the great UX that IntelliJ does. I want the IDE to figure out where all the tests are and give me an easy way to run a single test/file/suite/feature. IMHO this is the killer IntelliJ feature for me.
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  I'm cautiously optimistic for https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I just got access to this the other day and I'm excited to try it out!
    - nop_slide 4y ago
      My initial experience loading a python project was disappointing. I don't know if I didn't configure it right but auto complete and syntax highlighting didn't seem to work properly.
      - aniforprez 4y ago
        Isn't it just a frontend with the actual language servers and the whole IDE back end running somewhere else? At least that's what I thought it was from their announcement. Sort of like GitHub codespaces
- brundolf 4y ago
  Depending on the language (I've seen it in Rust and Deno), VSCode has inline buttons that appear over individual tests to run them
tetraca 4y ago
> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? I know a few people like this. More or less, they all got burned by some technical issue that made IDEA unusable for them one day, so they quickly cobbled together a bunch of extensions in VS Code just to get their work done and stayed.
burlesona 4y ago
It's just the NPM problem. The barrier to entry being low means the ecosystem is gargantuan which means there's tons of bike shedding duplication and lots and lots of abandonware. So it's good that you have tons of options, but bad that curation is needed and tailoring your environment takes a lot of work.
goodoldneon 4y ago
You're deploying via VS Code? If so, that's a weird pattern. I've been using VS Code for years to write JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Terraform, and CSS. My settings file is 60 lines, 42 of which are "for file extension X use autoformatter Y" configs. When I first switched to VS Code I was frustrated trying to make it conform to random expectations I had. Eventually I learned that it's easier to embrace VS Code's defaults for 99% of things. I just want an IDE that works well (nearly) out-of-the-box and VS Code gives me that
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > You're deploying via VS Code? If so, that's a weird pattern. I don't think it's a weird pattern, maybe a slightly legacy one but not out of the ordinary. I've seen this pattern used at multiple places (not implement by me). It makes sense if you have special use-cases where you need to use physical hardware and/or a local stack is too heavy or complicated to run.
  - presentation 4y ago
    Though why does it need to be in your editor vs some command line tools or something else?
    - danuker 4y ago
      So you can deploy at a moment's notice. Why run a command instead of hitting a key combo? Or even deploy as soon as tests pass? Software should allow that. Especially software for writing other software.
      - Drew_ 4y ago
        Or just run a command with a key combo. Or setup your test script to run a command afterwards. This is what every IDE is doing in the background.
        6510 4y ago
qsort 4y ago
I use both pycharm professional and vscode; vscode's remote is much better and it makes it way easier to work on projects that use multiple programming languages. Also the default editor of the IDEA family is just unbearable (but there's the vim plugin for that, I guess), while Monaco is fine. The only area where vscode is downright embarassing is interfacing with databases. In pycharm I can have a complete view of the database I'm connected to, run queries, get warnings and errors from inline SQL, and so on. Vscode has... strings? If the remote capabilities get better, though, I'd admittedly have no reason to stay in the vscode camp.
throw_m239339 4y ago
For Java dev, VSCode just can't compete with IDEA. For JS/Typescript/PHP, VScode is fine, but it doesn't beat PHPStorm intellisense and code quality tools. But one is free, the other is paid...
lmarcos 4y ago
I cannot stand the "dancing" sidebar in VS Code. It's used for showing the directory tree, search results, plugins, etc. I like Jetbrain IDEs (at least on my machine they load and feel fast).
- mikewhy 4y ago
  FYI you can drag anything from the sidebar to the bottom pane. It's not much, but can help with the overloaded sidebar.
brundolf 4y ago
Can't stand IDEA if there's a decent VSCode plugin for the language I'm working with (which there generally is). It's way too sluggish, I avoid it as much as possible I used it for a year or so around 2015. It was a huge improvement over Eclipse, which is what I'd been using since this was at a Java shop, but even then I knew it was sluggish. I just assumed back then that you couldn't have IDE features without sluggishness. Now I know better (To be clear I have no idea how VSCode's Java experience, specifically, compares with IDEA these days; I haven't written Java since 2015)
andjd 4y ago
I have used both, and use both working daily. If I could get away with doing everything in VSCode, I would. Part of this is how the community treats tools. VSCode is an editor, with some plugin support that lets it work as a bit of an IDE. But these are almost always optional. Code ecosystems and communities built around an IDE tend to only support working in that IDE, so there's typically only one way to do things, good or bad.
saghm 4y ago
> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? Yep, I've tried Intellij several times over the past 5-6 years, but I've never really had an experience I liked. It's interesting that you mention SFTP and remote server deploys as a pain point for you in VS Code, because I've actually had a huge amount of frustration trying to do development over SSH in Intellij.. As of Intellij 2021 edition, I was completely unable to get ssh working from my work laptop to an EC2 instance; it could not parse my `~/.ssh/config`, and manually putting in the username, hostname, path to the private key, and even port 22 (because it literally required putting the port manually rather than defaulting to 22 unless stated otherwise), it would just say it failed to connect. The 2022 version has a "remote ssh" beta feature which also required manually putting in info that I felt like it should just be able to parse from my ssh config file, but it did connect and work for a week or two. One day it randomly started disconnecting a few seconds into loading a file continuously, which made it impossible to even scroll down into the file before it just zoomed me back up to the top. I gave up on it and just decided to stick with VS code for everything rather than try to get Intellij to work for the small amount of Java code I occasionally have to write. Setting up ssh development with VS Code, on the other hand, was a breeze. The first plugin that came up when I searched "ssh" was Microsoft's own for ssh development, and running the command to connect to a server after installing it popped up with a list of my servers parsed from my ~/.ssh/config, which I could just select and it would connect (or prompt for a password if the ssh key required one). From there, I could easily open any project on my remote server, and VS Code even was able to detect which plugins I had installed for use with the project needed to be installed server-side rather than locally (e.g. the `rust-analyzer` plugin was installed remotely since it needed to run the daemon on the machine where the code existed). When I close my VS code window, shut down my laptop, and then the next day boot it up and open VS code, it still has the same files opened to the exact same spot (compared to Intellij's "scroll to the top of a file on connection" I mentioned before). I'm sure there are ways to get Intellij to work like I'd want, and I'm by no means a fan of Microsoft in general (I avoid Windows whenever possible and overall have a pretty negative opinion of them), but VS Code just absolutely nails the UX I want in an editor without needing that much custom configuration compared to what I've tried in the past with emacs/vim.
forgetfulness 4y ago
It's trite to say "the best tool for the job", but language support can vary drastically from one editor platform to another. So I end up using IDEA if I'm working with Scala and Java at a job, Emacs if using Clojure, vim for those tasks that are kind of like using sed and awk but not quite, and for everything else, like Terraform, Python, shell, SQL, there's VS Code.
reitanqild 4y ago
I use and have used both a lot. I was about to give up WebStorm the other day, but eventually got around it. Jetbrains products are very good, but they feel a little "French" just like Macs: beautiful, but be aware that on some models the handbrake is on the same side as the door so you might end up tearing up your pants or bruising your thigh until you learn to be careful :-/ VS Code by comparison is very straightforward, but not always as sophisticated. Personally I'd use NetBeans for backend and VS Code for frontend but because of Kotlin (which is great) I'm stuck with IntelliJ anyways.
likortera 4y ago
I've tried too many times already to use the Jetbrains IDEs, because I know they're great, specially about the IntelliSense stuff, autocompletion, suggestions, etc. But I just can't. My fingers are just too used to vscode, and I can do everything I need to. I feel like vscode is better at everything, and faster, except for the IntelliSense stuff. But lately I've tried GitHub Copilot and that just compensates it sooooo much, to the point I think it is even better than IDEA at suggesting stuff. Also, working mostly with JavaScript and Typescript makes the difference go away (for me at least) as it is damn good at it. Being free and open source also is a big plus for using it. And I love also how easy it is to configure... just a JSON with autocompletion for any setting you want to tweak. So much easier than having to mess with a ton of tabs and sections and search for settings, etc, etc. But, if your language is not well supported in vscode, I agree Jetbrain's IDES are great and probably the best option out there. Specially IntelliJ if you're doing Java/Kotlin etc...
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Muscle memory is a powerful motivator for sure. I was configuring vscode locally on my box so I could then send instructions to this other developer and my hotkeys not working was enraging. I use GitHub Copilot on IDEA and have quite enjoyed it as well. It's funny how we have such opposite feelings on config (you enjoying the json config and me preferring UI). I have nothing against vscode and I'm glad it exists, likewise I've very glad IDEA/Intellij exists for my own uses. Thanks for the feedback.
- rimunroe 4y ago
  Does VS Code support more refactoring and code generation now? I last used it heavily over a year ago, and at the time it seemed like anything beyond moving files and renaming things wasn't really doable. Meanwhile, in JetBrains's software I can extract and inline variables and functions, change signatures, split things out into other files, and more. I think I tried a plugin or two which were supposed to handle those things, but they either just didn't work at all or weren't reliable.
  - brundolf 4y ago
TameAntelope 4y ago
I come from an era where the more fully featured your IDE, the less likely you were to truly understand what was going on under the hood. I strongly recommend everyone spend their first ~5 years coding in vim or some other basic text editor (preferably through the terminal), before leaning on an IDE to solve their problems for them. That said, VSCode is now my go-to IDE, and I haven't opened WebStorm in probably ~6 months. It's lighter weight than the IDEA suite of IDEs, and gives me ~80% of the functionality, so it's been a pretty good tradeoff.
- 999900000999 4y ago
  Would you even do that with C# ? I actually dislike computer science classes which won't let me just use an IDE. No one can memorize the .net 7 API
  - heartbreak 4y ago
    VS Code and Vim have intelligent autocomplete for C#, although Vim requires significantly more configuration to get it working.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    .NET Core and beyond yes. For older .NET you really need classic VS or you will probably have a bad time.
- bbkane 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't think VSCode hides much of what's going on from you. Generally I use it to edit code and then run "go run ." on the side.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  There are languages, like C#, Java, and Kotlin, where the language design basically assumes an IDE is being used. It's just not practical or useful to deal with imports and their structure. Sure you can look them up on javadocs and copy/paste the import path. But at that point why not just use an ide? Why learn a skill you'll basically never use or need?
pornel 4y ago
I use Sublime Text, but it has its own issues with Python fragility and needing tweaks to plug-in's config files more than I'd like, so I'll probably switch to VSCode eventually. Java IDEs seem to be living in their own world, but for everything else VSCode works well thanks to LSP. For example rust-analyzer works best with VSCode, and this makes VSCode the best Rust IDE.
- Mo3 4y ago
  Same here, was a very happy Sublime Text user for years - much faster and less memory intensive than VSCode, but recently switched over because of all the tweaking required.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bastardoperator 4y ago
I purchased pycharm, couldn't stand it, logged bugs that are still open from over 5 years ago coupled with the fact I didn't see any immediate benefits coming from vim and vscode. I would never deploy from an ide, and I'm willing to make a small investment when it comes to my tools and productivity. Also, as of lately, copilot is saving me an insane amount of time especially when it comes to boilerplate and testing.
shp0ngle 4y ago
I went from GoLand (their go thing) back to vscode. With gopls, vscode is MUCH faster than goland, especially on big repos, and I don’t need to watch the dreaded “Indexing…” all the time. It misses some features, but honestly it’s so much snappier, so that wins for me.
Starlevel001 4y ago
I use IntelliJ for the bulk of my programming (which is nearly all Kotlin/Java) and begrudgingly switch to VSCode for other languages (i.e. Rust). It's hard going from something that seems to magically understand my code to an editor where everything, even supposedly core functionality, is a second-class citizen.
syspec 4y ago
You're a brave man for asking this question!
bfelbo 4y ago
When coding JS + SQL, nothing beats WebStorm’s DB plug-in with SQL auto-completion, validation, etc. I really wish the VS Code SQL/Postgres plugins would get there, but it’s a lot of work so I get that it probably will never happen unless Microsoft puts in the effort.

colordrops 4y ago

Totally agree, if I'm gonna put effort into building my IDE it's gonna be vim or emacs. I use nvim most of the time and intellij on occasion for debugging.

johnchristopher 4y ago
Oh, I do the same. Coding in vim and debugging in vscode. The GUI and mouse support is a better experience.
vultour 4y ago
Ah, a fellow full-time vim user. There are dozens of us!
stefanos82 4y ago
lol, I jump between Vim and NetBeans almost on a daily basis! So it seems I'm not the only one who follows a similar pattern after all.

datalopers 4y ago

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview far better and faster than sftp

joshstrange 4y ago
I looked into that plugin but we don't run any special daemon/server for editing on our servers (nor do we want to).
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  Maybe don't edit on a server. Have you heard of git?
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    There is no need to act like this. Of course I've heard of git and we use it, we just don't use local (on the computer we develop on) dev environments, we have a mix of developer-specific VMs and local physical hardware due to the nature of our business.
    - heartbreak 4y ago
      I’d write the SFTP stuff as a script and invoke it as needed via a VS Code task. I have a few workflow-type things like this that I normally do via the CLI, but now I’ve added them as tasks to VS Code for convenience. I can also create the task at the project level and check in the JSON config so that teammates can use those same tasks.
  - seabrookmx 4y ago
    +1 for remote ssh. If you can SFTP to the box you can use this feature. The only possible wrinkle is the developer box needs the build toolchain. If you're writing python, your remote box obviously already has it to run your app. But if you're writing Rust or golang, it's very possible the remote machine doesn't have the compilers.

bckr 4y ago

> setup deploys to a dev server from vscode What does this mean? Setting it up so you can deploy through GUI?

joshstrange 4y ago
On save, deploy the file out to a dev server(s) that runs the full stack (1 or more server per developer that only they use).
- speedgoose 4y ago
  It sounds like your development flow is a bit unusual nowadays, which could explain why no one bothers to maintain such vscode plugin.
  - bckr 4y ago
    I have to agree. I'd rather open the terminal and do a git push or otherwise run a command rather than having every save get deployed.

hombre_fatal 4y ago

> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. It just turns out they aren’t better in every way, and possibly not in the ways that matter. VSCode plug-ins just have more eyeballs and work done on them for various ecosystems, for example. Especially for less common languages and features.

joshstrange 4y ago
> Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. I would expect the opposite to be true. I could be wrong but it seems like the free editor that's mentioned in lots of tutorials would be the one newer developers gravitate to over a paid tool like IDEA.
indymike 4y ago
> Everyone who uses VSCode has surely used an IDE before. It just turns out they aren’t better in every way, and possibly not in the ways that matter. Almost every junior I hire has only used Atom, Sublime or VS Code, especially JavaScript developers. >VSCode plug-ins just have more eyeballs and work done on them for various ecosystems, for example. Especially for less common languages and features. The reason to switch to an IDE from something more flexible like VSCode or Emacs is the amount of time spent keeping the editor working.
- tristan957 4y ago
  VSCode has been working just fine for me for the last 5 years. Not sure what you mean by "keeping it working." I program in C/C++, Rust, Python, Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Java. Never had a problem that made me bang my head against the desk.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  > The reason to switch to an IDE from something more flexible like VSCode or Emacs is the amount of time spent keeping the editor working. An editor will generally not stop working like a car without oil. But, IDEs may stop working due to more complex configurations and disparate use cases.

csours 4y ago

I use IDEA and VS Code and Notepad++ and ... I'm kind of surprised you did a deploy from VS Code. I would have assumed there was another tool for that. I do most of my git and ssh/scp stuff from the command line because I'm never quite sure what the tool will try to do to "help me out"

joshstrange 4y ago
For myself it's all about reducing the delay between "writing code" and "seeing the results". Dropping down to scp or run a script to deploy files seems like an unnecessary delay/break in my development process that I don't like adding in. If you can develop 100% locally this isn't an issue but we can't (or haven't taken the time to do so). Think of the dev server as just a VM running locally and it might make more sense.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  Why not pop out an integrated terminal and execute commands there? It's still within the editor and you could have a shell script that runs to deploy.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    It all comes back to that "development cycle" and wanting to make that as short as possible. What you suggest is absolutely fine, it's just my personal preference (and something that I've seen help other devs) to make the "write code"->"see results" as tight as possible. If you add any delays, any potential chance of forgetting a step, etc then it breaks my programming flow which can kill my productivity.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      But aren't you executing a task either way? Either running a script, or executing a command through Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P, you have to do something to deploy. I mean, hell, just set up gulp/grunt/another task runner to watch your files and run scp if you want it continuously running? Why involve your IDE at all at that point?

rychco 4y ago

I personally use CLion for all my C/C++ work, even preferring it over Visual Studio proper. It handles the environments, builds, build systems, etc for me a so I can focus on programming. VSCode is what I use for everything else (mostly Python, Golang, Web stuff) when I don't need the IDE overhead.

tomca32 4y ago

I switch back and forth between IntelliJ products and VSCode. As a pure editor I prefer VSCode. It's fast and has a great plugin ecosystem. Another great feature is that it's config is just a JSON file that I can put into git and push it to my dotfiles repo making it easy to share config on all of my machines. However, there's just some functionality in IntelliJ that I miss in VSCode like running tests. Of course there are plugins but they are all clunky and don't give you the great UX that IntelliJ does. I want the IDE to figure out where all the tests are and give me an easy way to run a single test/file/suite/feature. IMHO this is the killer IntelliJ feature for me.

dingleberry420 4y ago
I'm cautiously optimistic for https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I just got access to this the other day and I'm excited to try it out!
  - nop_slide 4y ago
    My initial experience loading a python project was disappointing. I don't know if I didn't configure it right but auto complete and syntax highlighting didn't seem to work properly.
    - aniforprez 4y ago
      Isn't it just a frontend with the actual language servers and the whole IDE back end running somewhere else? At least that's what I thought it was from their announcement. Sort of like GitHub codespaces
brundolf 4y ago
Depending on the language (I've seen it in Rust and Deno), VSCode has inline buttons that appear over individual tests to run them

tetraca 4y ago

> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? I know a few people like this. More or less, they all got burned by some technical issue that made IDEA unusable for them one day, so they quickly cobbled together a bunch of extensions in VS Code just to get their work done and stayed.

burlesona 4y ago

It's just the NPM problem. The barrier to entry being low means the ecosystem is gargantuan which means there's tons of bike shedding duplication and lots and lots of abandonware. So it's good that you have tons of options, but bad that curation is needed and tailoring your environment takes a lot of work.

goodoldneon 4y ago

You're deploying via VS Code? If so, that's a weird pattern. I've been using VS Code for years to write JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Go, Terraform, and CSS. My settings file is 60 lines, 42 of which are "for file extension X use autoformatter Y" configs. When I first switched to VS Code I was frustrated trying to make it conform to random expectations I had. Eventually I learned that it's easier to embrace VS Code's defaults for 99% of things. I just want an IDE that works well (nearly) out-of-the-box and VS Code gives me that

joshstrange 4y ago
> You're deploying via VS Code? If so, that's a weird pattern. I don't think it's a weird pattern, maybe a slightly legacy one but not out of the ordinary. I've seen this pattern used at multiple places (not implement by me). It makes sense if you have special use-cases where you need to use physical hardware and/or a local stack is too heavy or complicated to run.
- presentation 4y ago
  Though why does it need to be in your editor vs some command line tools or something else?
  - danuker 4y ago
    So you can deploy at a moment's notice. Why run a command instead of hitting a key combo? Or even deploy as soon as tests pass? Software should allow that. Especially software for writing other software.
    - Drew_ 4y ago
      Or just run a command with a key combo. Or setup your test script to run a command afterwards. This is what every IDE is doing in the background.
      - 6510 4y ago

qsort 4y ago

I use both pycharm professional and vscode; vscode's remote is much better and it makes it way easier to work on projects that use multiple programming languages. Also the default editor of the IDEA family is just unbearable (but there's the vim plugin for that, I guess), while Monaco is fine. The only area where vscode is downright embarassing is interfacing with databases. In pycharm I can have a complete view of the database I'm connected to, run queries, get warnings and errors from inline SQL, and so on. Vscode has... strings? If the remote capabilities get better, though, I'd admittedly have no reason to stay in the vscode camp.

throw_m239339 4y ago

For Java dev, VSCode just can't compete with IDEA. For JS/Typescript/PHP, VScode is fine, but it doesn't beat PHPStorm intellisense and code quality tools. But one is free, the other is paid...

lmarcos 4y ago

I cannot stand the "dancing" sidebar in VS Code. It's used for showing the directory tree, search results, plugins, etc. I like Jetbrain IDEs (at least on my machine they load and feel fast).

mikewhy 4y ago
FYI you can drag anything from the sidebar to the bottom pane. It's not much, but can help with the overloaded sidebar.

brundolf 4y ago

Can't stand IDEA if there's a decent VSCode plugin for the language I'm working with (which there generally is). It's way too sluggish, I avoid it as much as possible I used it for a year or so around 2015. It was a huge improvement over Eclipse, which is what I'd been using since this was at a Java shop, but even then I knew it was sluggish. I just assumed back then that you couldn't have IDE features without sluggishness. Now I know better (To be clear I have no idea how VSCode's Java experience, specifically, compares with IDEA these days; I haven't written Java since 2015)

andjd 4y ago

I have used both, and use both working daily. If I could get away with doing everything in VSCode, I would. Part of this is how the community treats tools. VSCode is an editor, with some plugin support that lets it work as a bit of an IDE. But these are almost always optional. Code ecosystems and communities built around an IDE tend to only support working in that IDE, so there's typically only one way to do things, good or bad.

saghm 4y ago

> I know a lot of people love vscode but are there any people who have tried something like IDEA/WebStorm/PHPStorm/etc that then went back to vscode? Yep, I've tried Intellij several times over the past 5-6 years, but I've never really had an experience I liked. It's interesting that you mention SFTP and remote server deploys as a pain point for you in VS Code, because I've actually had a huge amount of frustration trying to do development over SSH in Intellij.. As of Intellij 2021 edition, I was completely unable to get ssh working from my work laptop to an EC2 instance; it could not parse my `~/.ssh/config`, and manually putting in the username, hostname, path to the private key, and even port 22 (because it literally required putting the port manually rather than defaulting to 22 unless stated otherwise), it would just say it failed to connect. The 2022 version has a "remote ssh" beta feature which also required manually putting in info that I felt like it should just be able to parse from my ssh config file, but it did connect and work for a week or two. One day it randomly started disconnecting a few seconds into loading a file continuously, which made it impossible to even scroll down into the file before it just zoomed me back up to the top. I gave up on it and just decided to stick with VS code for everything rather than try to get Intellij to work for the small amount of Java code I occasionally have to write. Setting up ssh development with VS Code, on the other hand, was a breeze. The first plugin that came up when I searched "ssh" was Microsoft's own for ssh development, and running the command to connect to a server after installing it popped up with a list of my servers parsed from my ~/.ssh/config, which I could just select and it would connect (or prompt for a password if the ssh key required one). From there, I could easily open any project on my remote server, and VS Code even was able to detect which plugins I had installed for use with the project needed to be installed server-side rather than locally (e.g. the `rust-analyzer` plugin was installed remotely since it needed to run the daemon on the machine where the code existed). When I close my VS code window, shut down my laptop, and then the next day boot it up and open VS code, it still has the same files opened to the exact same spot (compared to Intellij's "scroll to the top of a file on connection" I mentioned before). I'm sure there are ways to get Intellij to work like I'd want, and I'm by no means a fan of Microsoft in general (I avoid Windows whenever possible and overall have a pretty negative opinion of them), but VS Code just absolutely nails the UX I want in an editor without needing that much custom configuration compared to what I've tried in the past with emacs/vim.

forgetfulness 4y ago

It's trite to say "the best tool for the job", but language support can vary drastically from one editor platform to another. So I end up using IDEA if I'm working with Scala and Java at a job, Emacs if using Clojure, vim for those tasks that are kind of like using sed and awk but not quite, and for everything else, like Terraform, Python, shell, SQL, there's VS Code.

reitanqild 4y ago

I use and have used both a lot. I was about to give up WebStorm the other day, but eventually got around it. Jetbrains products are very good, but they feel a little "French" just like Macs: beautiful, but be aware that on some models the handbrake is on the same side as the door so you might end up tearing up your pants or bruising your thigh until you learn to be careful :-/ VS Code by comparison is very straightforward, but not always as sophisticated. Personally I'd use NetBeans for backend and VS Code for frontend but because of Kotlin (which is great) I'm stuck with IntelliJ anyways.

likortera 4y ago

I've tried too many times already to use the Jetbrains IDEs, because I know they're great, specially about the IntelliSense stuff, autocompletion, suggestions, etc. But I just can't. My fingers are just too used to vscode, and I can do everything I need to. I feel like vscode is better at everything, and faster, except for the IntelliSense stuff. But lately I've tried GitHub Copilot and that just compensates it sooooo much, to the point I think it is even better than IDEA at suggesting stuff. Also, working mostly with JavaScript and Typescript makes the difference go away (for me at least) as it is damn good at it. Being free and open source also is a big plus for using it. And I love also how easy it is to configure... just a JSON with autocompletion for any setting you want to tweak. So much easier than having to mess with a ton of tabs and sections and search for settings, etc, etc. But, if your language is not well supported in vscode, I agree Jetbrain's IDES are great and probably the best option out there. Specially IntelliJ if you're doing Java/Kotlin etc...

joshstrange 4y ago
Muscle memory is a powerful motivator for sure. I was configuring vscode locally on my box so I could then send instructions to this other developer and my hotkeys not working was enraging. I use GitHub Copilot on IDEA and have quite enjoyed it as well. It's funny how we have such opposite feelings on config (you enjoying the json config and me preferring UI). I have nothing against vscode and I'm glad it exists, likewise I've very glad IDEA/Intellij exists for my own uses. Thanks for the feedback.
rimunroe 4y ago
Does VS Code support more refactoring and code generation now? I last used it heavily over a year ago, and at the time it seemed like anything beyond moving files and renaming things wasn't really doable. Meanwhile, in JetBrains's software I can extract and inline variables and functions, change signatures, split things out into other files, and more. I think I tried a plugin or two which were supposed to handle those things, but they either just didn't work at all or weren't reliable.
- brundolf 4y ago

TameAntelope 4y ago

I come from an era where the more fully featured your IDE, the less likely you were to truly understand what was going on under the hood. I strongly recommend everyone spend their first ~5 years coding in vim or some other basic text editor (preferably through the terminal), before leaning on an IDE to solve their problems for them. That said, VSCode is now my go-to IDE, and I haven't opened WebStorm in probably ~6 months. It's lighter weight than the IDEA suite of IDEs, and gives me ~80% of the functionality, so it's been a pretty good tradeoff.

999900000999 4y ago
Would you even do that with C# ? I actually dislike computer science classes which won't let me just use an IDE. No one can memorize the .net 7 API
- heartbreak 4y ago
  VS Code and Vim have intelligent autocomplete for C#, although Vim requires significantly more configuration to get it working.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  .NET Core and beyond yes. For older .NET you really need classic VS or you will probably have a bad time.
bbkane 4y ago
Honestly, I don't think VSCode hides much of what's going on from you. Generally I use it to edit code and then run "go run ." on the side.
kllrnohj 4y ago
There are languages, like C#, Java, and Kotlin, where the language design basically assumes an IDE is being used. It's just not practical or useful to deal with imports and their structure. Sure you can look them up on javadocs and copy/paste the import path. But at that point why not just use an ide? Why learn a skill you'll basically never use or need?

pornel 4y ago

I use Sublime Text, but it has its own issues with Python fragility and needing tweaks to plug-in's config files more than I'd like, so I'll probably switch to VSCode eventually. Java IDEs seem to be living in their own world, but for everything else VSCode works well thanks to LSP. For example rust-analyzer works best with VSCode, and this makes VSCode the best Rust IDE.

Mo3 4y ago
Same here, was a very happy Sublime Text user for years - much faster and less memory intensive than VSCode, but recently switched over because of all the tweaking required.

deleted 4y ago

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bastardoperator 4y ago

I purchased pycharm, couldn't stand it, logged bugs that are still open from over 5 years ago coupled with the fact I didn't see any immediate benefits coming from vim and vscode. I would never deploy from an ide, and I'm willing to make a small investment when it comes to my tools and productivity. Also, as of lately, copilot is saving me an insane amount of time especially when it comes to boilerplate and testing.

shp0ngle 4y ago

I went from GoLand (their go thing) back to vscode. With gopls, vscode is MUCH faster than goland, especially on big repos, and I don’t need to watch the dreaded “Indexing…” all the time. It misses some features, but honestly it’s so much snappier, so that wins for me.

Starlevel001 4y ago

I use IntelliJ for the bulk of my programming (which is nearly all Kotlin/Java) and begrudgingly switch to VSCode for other languages (i.e. Rust). It's hard going from something that seems to magically understand my code to an editor where everything, even supposedly core functionality, is a second-class citizen.

syspec 4y ago

You're a brave man for asking this question!

bfelbo 4y ago

When coding JS + SQL, nothing beats WebStorm’s DB plug-in with SQL auto-completion, validation, etc. I really wish the VS Code SQL/Postgres plugins would get there, but it’s a lot of work so I get that it probably will never happen unless Microsoft puts in the effort.