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by JL2010 3863 days ago
Has anyone spent a lot of time with VS Code? I tried it a while back when it was first announced and have not found a reason to re-visit it yet. At the time it felt like a sublime-text alternative instead of an IDE (was it always positioned to be just an editor?) Always great to see more options though.
12 comments

Ya, it is just and editor. I have been using it on OSX for a while now and I like it's simplicity. The git integration is also very nice.

ETA: yes it has debuggers for some languages as well, though none that I am using at the moment.

One of my top requests to their team is to support rebasing (for squashing and avoiding merge commits)
Thanks Micah, we just added it to the roadmap at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/Roadmap.
It is far from perfect, but it proved to me you can build a modern editor on top of chromium without killing my battery and cpu, unlike, you know, atom.
It's my daily driver. It's the best TypeScript editor on OSX, and that's why I use it for.
I use it purely for its Git integration. Nothing fancy, just implemented very well.
In addition to debugging NodeJS projects, there is also work on integration with Chrome and Go.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/vscode/Debuggers

You can set breakpoints, check out the call stack, and inspect local variables.

It's pretty good, at least on OS X. Clean, fast, doesn't suck down your battery like Atom.
I never thought I'd ditch Sublime Text after using it almost exclusively since TextMate (so for the past few years). I especially never thought I'd ditch it for a Microsoft product. And perhaps most importantly, I never thought I'd use an editor that didn't have Vim keybindings (yet! it's at the top of their list, apparently).

But after using VS Code for a while now I'm pretty sure I'll keep using it, at least for Node.js development. The IntelliSense support through TypeScript definitions, the out-of-the-box support for what I consider essentials (linting, task running, emmett, etc.), and perhaps most importantly the built-in debugger make my life significantly easier.

I enjoyed working with node-inspector, but the debugging in VS Code is a lot more convenient (mostly).

To be fair, for non-node development I'd say VS Code is not yet good enough to replace Sublime Text, but that might change when enough plugins and features have been added.

What it boils down to for me is that VS Code somehow seems to be optimized exactly for my workflow. It doesn't have tons of buttons and interface elements that I don't need (as many IDE's do), and it isn't slow. But on the other hand it offers very sensible defaults that other editors such as Atom and Sublime don't have. On both those editors I've had some issues with setting up linting, debugging, IntelliSense, and a few misc. other things. The main reason for that, I suppose, is that they're all plugins developed by different people. I like how these just come with VS Code and work right away.

I'm rather baffled that I'm saying all this, considering my general aversion of using Microsoft products (even if this is based on the past). But it is what it is. VS Code is a huge timesaver for me, and (mostly) hits the sweet spot between plain, fast editor and IDE.

But please give me Vim support ASAP :).

It is my main IDE for Typescript since v0.1. VSCode in combination with TypeScript provides a superior Frontend-Dev experience to any other Language - IDE combination in my opinion.

Apart from an occasional restart required it has been pretty solid. Performance(autocompletion etc) is very good and for TypeScript development, VSCode is pretty feature complete...

I think that's exactly what it is trying to be: a simple editor with some capabilities.

A lot of people expect a "real IDE" to have a lot of fancy, specific, semi-proprietary features, but what I believe VSC is providing great editing capabilities and offloading everything else to good task managers (and now, extensions). A lot that you can do in "real IDEs" (like building your project) can be handled by Gulp, Grunt, or other runners in a more or less independent way. I actually prefer it this way now, regardless of the IDE I use - that allows my projects to be independent of the IDE.

To me, where VSC shines is really in editing comfort, be it with the super fast typing response (really!), or with the Git integration, or with how it handles work space for opened files. It looks like it is supposed to be uncomplicated.

> super fast typing response

How do you measure the typing response? Do you have a speed camera hooked up or something!?

This is one that I admit is fairly subjective, and I apologize in advance if this is not scientific enough, but: it just feels right.

I think they optimized the way code drawing is done in such a way that it just happens with the least amount of time possible between typing and drawing. The end result is the same as if you typed anywhere else, but because the response is cut by, say, 16ms, it just feels fast. I remember the first time I tried VSC - I almost felt like the letters where coming out from under the cursor ahead of time! It was a weird moment.

The counterpoint is IntelliJ. It's not a slow IDE (I used Eclipse before so that'd be unfair to say), but maybe it has a couple of frames too many before drawing what's typed, so it feels like it's lagging in comparison. Maybe why they're making it a point of future releases[1] to reduce any typing lag.

[1] http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-lat...

- The UI is really conservative with vertical space, giving the feeling that the editor is really getting out of your way.

- I like the 2-pane integrated Git panel.

I use VS primarily but use code a couple times a day for "quick edits" (mainly to web.Config files and the like)

I'm not properly coding in it yet.

Currently testing the Golang tools, quite happy so far. Previously used sublime text