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Speaking of using sharp tools…. I really don’t get the love for VSCode. I’ve used Jetbrains for years and last week gave VSCode a really solid try. Man what a

Speaking of using sharp tools…. I really don’t get the love for VSCode. I’ve used Jetbrains for years and last week gave VSCode a really solid try. Man what a mess. Everything is a plug-in, plug-ins are inconsistent, getting basic things to work requires a tsunami of plugins. Everything feels half baked and duplicated and needing updates or abandoned ugh. Nothing feels professional because everything is a plug-in built by random person X or y or maybe some plugins are professional I don’t know. And even when I’d plugged in as much stuff as I could find it still couldn’t do basic things like find and import node modules. I abandoned the experiment and gladly went back to JetBrains where the tools are sharp, available and well organised.

jdc0589 3y ago
100%. I'd be using jetbrains stuff right now if I wasn't experiencing weird inexplicable issues with Rider in the .netcore stack. Legit the first real issues I've had with their stuff in over 10 years.
stinkbutt 3y ago
i tried Goland (the Jetbrains IDE for Go) and when my mouse hovers over a variable the IDE does not provide a tool tip that tells me what its type is. And for that reason I've stuck with VS Code.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Carducci 3y ago
  This is simply not true. I have been using Goland since the first beta and can remember this feature being in there and using since then.
tpmx 3y ago
I used Emacs for about two decades. It worked well and did exactly what I wanted it to. Then I started using Copilot+VSCode while learning a for me new language (Python) this spring. I've grown rather fond of VSCode since, to be honest. This extension by Yuichiro Tachibana is the one to use to get Emacs keybindings, btw: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee.emacs-mcx https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...
- jacobsenscott 3y ago
  I almost went to vscode for copilot, but then I found out emacs can run copilot too. It works great.
SamuelAdams 3y ago
As a 2+ year user of Vs Code for daily dev work - yes, this is accurate. Code is a lot like Linux: lightweight, fast, and a royal pain to set up. But once it is set up with a cocktail of plugins it is rock solid. It is also much faster than any other IDE I have used. However I am a weird user - I don’t usually use buttons on the ide. I just pop open a terminal for things like git commands, build commands, test commands, etc.
- mid-kid 3y ago
  It still astounds me that people actually use "lightweight" and "fast" to describe vscode these days. How times change.
  - SamuelAdams 3y ago
    Compared to the competition. I don’t use VI or EMacs. I compare code to Visual Studio Pro 2022 or any Jetbrains product. It feels lightweight and snappy when opening and loading a new project, opening individual files, and searching through a repo. I will say though that Jetbrains Idea and Rider are getting much better, but vscode is free whereas those are quite expensive. So if I can get 90% of the functionality for 100% less cost, I will do it.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I second GP. My point of comparison isn't just Emacs, but also Visual Studio 2015 and 2017, as used for C++. The editor in VS feels snappy, in this general and hard to pinpoint way that lets you easily tell apart a native app from an Electron one. Conversely, despite being reasonably performant (for modern standards), it still feels a little heavy. I don't know what it is exactly, but I know I'm very sensitive to it. That's the main reason I rarely use VS Code, despite being more feature-packed than VC++ (or, along a few dimensions, even my Emacs) - extra features are nice, but not worth the ongoing discomfort I'd feel with every single key press. My current hypothesis is that VS Code (and JetBrains IDEs too, so it's not strictly an Electron thing) tends to do too much stuff asynchronously at the same time, making execution times of most actions highly variable and potentially unreliable. The variability usually isn't huge in absolute terms - it's just big enough to be annoying.
BD103 3y ago
This is fair for certain languages like JS or Java (IntelliJ is amazing), but not as much for less popular languages. I started learning Rust a few years ago, where the Rust plugin for Jetbrains IDEs was still in its infancy. Switching to VSCode specifically for rust-analyzer was a great decision for me, due to the amount of tooling included. VSCode is popular because it is easy to learn for a beginner and shares much of the language server tooling with Vim and other popular editors. If you write a language server, it can work across multiple editors like VSCode and Neovim. (Though not Jetbrains IDEs, as far as I'm aware.) Writing a plugin for Jetbrains will only work for Jetbrains, so there's less incentive. While Jetbrains have more powerful IDEs for specific languages, its less popular when VSCode, Vim, Helix, etc. all work together.
- user432678 3y ago
  JetBrains released an LSP integration for their IDEs sometime ago: https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-developers/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-d... Yes, it’s still new and somewhat buggy, but I am using Zig LSP plugin and it works pretty good.
  - BD103 3y ago
    Interesting! I stopped using Jetbrains IDEs by that time, which is why I didn’t mention it.
hu3 3y ago
Jetbrains tooling is amazing. But can you attach to a running Docker container and develop inside it using Jetbrains? Because last I checked I couldn't and was a blocker for my team. With VSCode I can attach to both local and remote environments using Remote Development plugin by Microsoft (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.vscode-remote-extensionpack https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...). Yes most things are plugins. But they are high quality and maintained by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Docker, Shopify, Vue team, etc. I like Docker development containers because they contain all the tools and configuration, down to the precise dependency and tooling versions. Not only is the onboarding easier but we get less surprises by small differences in environments.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  What do you mean “develop inside it”? Here’s a link on doing it with python https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/using-docker-as-a-remote-interpreter.html#config-docker https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/using-docker-as-a-rem...
  - probably_wrong 3y ago
    Note that this feature is only available in the Professional (that is, paid) version. And since VS Code can do it for free, it has the upper hand in money-tight environments.
    - andrewstuart 3y ago
      If you can't afford to pay for an IDE then your employer should get out of software development. That's a hard fact. Any organisation that can pay a salary or a contract rate, pay for a computer for the person to work on, pay for the hosting of their service, well they can also afford to pay for the tools that the developers need to do their job. And if they really can't, as I say, they should stop doing development because they are deeply unserious.
      - 3y ago
weakfortress 3y ago
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jdc0589 3y ago

100%. I'd be using jetbrains stuff right now if I wasn't experiencing weird inexplicable issues with Rider in the .netcore stack. Legit the first real issues I've had with their stuff in over 10 years.

stinkbutt 3y ago

i tried Goland (the Jetbrains IDE for Go) and when my mouse hovers over a variable the IDE does not provide a tool tip that tells me what its type is. And for that reason I've stuck with VS Code.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Carducci 3y ago
This is simply not true. I have been using Goland since the first beta and can remember this feature being in there and using since then.

tpmx 3y ago

I used Emacs for about two decades. It worked well and did exactly what I wanted it to. Then I started using Copilot+VSCode while learning a for me new language (Python) this spring. I've grown rather fond of VSCode since, to be honest. This extension by Yuichiro Tachibana is the one to use to get Emacs keybindings, btw: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee.emacs-mcx https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...

jacobsenscott 3y ago
I almost went to vscode for copilot, but then I found out emacs can run copilot too. It works great.

SamuelAdams 3y ago

As a 2+ year user of Vs Code for daily dev work - yes, this is accurate. Code is a lot like Linux: lightweight, fast, and a royal pain to set up. But once it is set up with a cocktail of plugins it is rock solid. It is also much faster than any other IDE I have used. However I am a weird user - I don’t usually use buttons on the ide. I just pop open a terminal for things like git commands, build commands, test commands, etc.

mid-kid 3y ago
It still astounds me that people actually use "lightweight" and "fast" to describe vscode these days. How times change.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  Compared to the competition. I don’t use VI or EMacs. I compare code to Visual Studio Pro 2022 or any Jetbrains product. It feels lightweight and snappy when opening and loading a new project, opening individual files, and searching through a repo. I will say though that Jetbrains Idea and Rider are getting much better, but vscode is free whereas those are quite expensive. So if I can get 90% of the functionality for 100% less cost, I will do it.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I second GP. My point of comparison isn't just Emacs, but also Visual Studio 2015 and 2017, as used for C++. The editor in VS feels snappy, in this general and hard to pinpoint way that lets you easily tell apart a native app from an Electron one. Conversely, despite being reasonably performant (for modern standards), it still feels a little heavy. I don't know what it is exactly, but I know I'm very sensitive to it. That's the main reason I rarely use VS Code, despite being more feature-packed than VC++ (or, along a few dimensions, even my Emacs) - extra features are nice, but not worth the ongoing discomfort I'd feel with every single key press. My current hypothesis is that VS Code (and JetBrains IDEs too, so it's not strictly an Electron thing) tends to do too much stuff asynchronously at the same time, making execution times of most actions highly variable and potentially unreliable. The variability usually isn't huge in absolute terms - it's just big enough to be annoying.

BD103 3y ago

This is fair for certain languages like JS or Java (IntelliJ is amazing), but not as much for less popular languages. I started learning Rust a few years ago, where the Rust plugin for Jetbrains IDEs was still in its infancy. Switching to VSCode specifically for rust-analyzer was a great decision for me, due to the amount of tooling included. VSCode is popular because it is easy to learn for a beginner and shares much of the language server tooling with Vim and other popular editors. If you write a language server, it can work across multiple editors like VSCode and Neovim. (Though not Jetbrains IDEs, as far as I'm aware.) Writing a plugin for Jetbrains will only work for Jetbrains, so there's less incentive. While Jetbrains have more powerful IDEs for specific languages, its less popular when VSCode, Vim, Helix, etc. all work together.

user432678 3y ago
JetBrains released an LSP integration for their IDEs sometime ago: https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-developers/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-d... Yes, it’s still new and somewhat buggy, but I am using Zig LSP plugin and it works pretty good.
- BD103 3y ago
  Interesting! I stopped using Jetbrains IDEs by that time, which is why I didn’t mention it.

hu3 3y ago

Jetbrains tooling is amazing. But can you attach to a running Docker container and develop inside it using Jetbrains? Because last I checked I couldn't and was a blocker for my team. With VSCode I can attach to both local and remote environments using Remote Development plugin by Microsoft (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.vscode-remote-extensionpack https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...). Yes most things are plugins. But they are high quality and maintained by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Docker, Shopify, Vue team, etc. I like Docker development containers because they contain all the tools and configuration, down to the precise dependency and tooling versions. Not only is the onboarding easier but we get less surprises by small differences in environments.

andrewstuart 3y ago
What do you mean “develop inside it”? Here’s a link on doing it with python https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/using-docker-as-a-remote-interpreter.html#config-docker https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/using-docker-as-a-rem...
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  Note that this feature is only available in the Professional (that is, paid) version. And since VS Code can do it for free, it has the upper hand in money-tight environments.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    If you can't afford to pay for an IDE then your employer should get out of software development. That's a hard fact. Any organisation that can pay a salary or a contract rate, pay for a computer for the person to work on, pay for the hosting of their service, well they can also afford to pay for the tools that the developers need to do their job. And if they really can't, as I say, they should stop doing development because they are deeply unserious.
    - 3y ago

weakfortress 3y ago

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