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by babuskov 2086 days ago
I'm curious. I know it's great for one-offs, but is anyone actually using VSCode as their main tool when so many native IDEs and text editors are available?

I would love to know what's your use case. Maybe I'm missing something big.
4 comments
nexuist 2086 days ago
I use it for every project. I mainly code node.js and sometimes Python.

Speed has never been an issue for me; VSCode boots up in under a second and easily chews through thousands of lines of code (albeit without tokenization).

The new SSH connection mode has been a lifesaver for me - you can now sync VSCode with a server you have SSH access to, meaning you can browse/open/save files remotely, and open as many terminals as you want on the target server. This makes it super easy to e.g. test code on different hardware or view logs or edit config files and such.

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babuskov 2085 days ago
Cool. I wasn't aware of this use case. Thanks.
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livre 2086 days ago
I'm using it as my main editor for a Django codebase. It's not my favorite IDE, it's a bit slow too but it's the best I could find for what I do. Also I haven't found any good native IDE that can handle Python, Django, HTML, CSS and JS as well as VSCode. There are IDEs that can do Python (and Django) and others for HTML, CSS and JS but I don't want to be constantly switching between the two. If you know a good IDE that can replace VSCode for my use case please let me know.
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egberts1 2086 days ago
Mmm, JetBrain PyCharm/CLion?
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livre 2085 days ago
I've tried JetBrains for Android dev and it's the best IDE I've used so far but it suffers from the same slowness issues as VSCode and has longer startup times. I should give it a try for Python/web dev, it may be a good replacement for VSCode for long sessions (I'll still be using VSCode for shorter ones because it starts quickly).
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ralphc 2086 days ago
Couple of years ago Salesforce switched from Eclipse plug-ins for development and went all in on VSCode. They have a set of plug-ins that log in to Salesforce and send configurations and code back and forth. They're even going to use "VSCode in the browser" to edit code in place in your organization.
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tracker1 2086 days ago
Absolutely... directory tree view and integrated terminal are the two big killer features for me... everything else is just extra awesomeness. Support for JS projects is pretty much best in class (Though jetbrains/webstorm is decent too).

Support for other languages like go, rust, C# (.Net Core) are pretty decent. The extensions/marketplace is incredible in terms of the breadth and depth of support for almost anything you can think of. I even have an enviornment setup with a settings file defaulting to CP437, where I use SSH remote extension in code to configure a remote telnet BBS.

Beyond all of this, it's relatively quick to load and run, though there are faster editors, I haven't seen a (much) faster IDE really.

The remote ssh extension is probably the third killer feature for me. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of those three things alone. I don't use some of the other features nearly as much as I rely on the console a lot, and the integrated terminal just makes it in the box as an experience.

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