Similarly, I see people leaving jetbrains every day. VS Code is getting better and better, and jetbrains tools are becoming more and more niche. While jetbrains may always be ahead, the gap is widening.
I doubt it - VS code is nowhere near a proper IDE like VS or IDEA - the only place where it's comparable is JS/TS because of how close those two teams are.
It does work when you needs something light weight - but it often craps out on large projects - ironically it slows down way more than the IDEs. For example I'm writing a Flutter/Dart project ATM - the VS code plugin becomes unusable after a while of working on the project even on a relatively small ~30kloc project. IDEA works just fine and has much better tools.
"VS code is nowhere near a proper IDE like VS or IDEA"
This statement kind of misses the point: it's not that 'VS Code is an IDE', rather it's that the value of an IDE may not be as much as what some think it is.
I would have made the same conclusion a decade ago, but with sufficient plugin/ability ... I have come to prefer VS Code along with many others and have little reason to go back to using an IDE.
That's not to deny the IDE uses case - for specific kinds of projects it's fine, but there's no doubt VS Code - a non-IDE - is picking up in an a ton of areas wherein traditionally and IDE would have been a first choice.
Even for basic stuff like symbol rename in a project it's behind good IDEs - search and replace is tedious when a tool can make it more specific without effort.
And like I said it often craps out on autocomplete alone with larger code bases for me (had this happen in Dart and C#)
It's the perfect IDE/editor for JS/Typescript - the rest is subpar.
For example I'm writing a Flutter/Dart project ATM - the VS code plugin becomes unusable after a while of working on the project even on a relatively small ~30kloc project.
I use VSCode on a project that's about 3* that right now (not including things like node modules or config) and it's never failed.
Are you sure the problem lies with VSCode rather than the Flutter/Dart plugin?
Oh it's absolutely the dart/flutter plugin. Just as it was the C# plugin when I attempted to use it as a VS replacement, and it was down to Rust plugin when I tried that.
So in the end the only decent experience I had with it was Typescript and JS.
Compare that to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. If I was mostly doing Web frontend or node I would 100% use vscode. Otherwise I just find it's too unreliable and I don't want to waste productivity energy on it. (I wish it was on IntelliJ level, I would pay for that with vscode remoting possibilities, more than I pay IntelliJ even)
I doubt it - it feels like it's more of an issue with language server implementations, Typescript is excellent even on large projects (better than IntelliJ and VS IMO)
Indeed, I just moved from VSCode to PyCharm a few weeks ago as VSCode and their error checker/syntax highlighter is vastly inferior. Looking to do the same for JS at some point but for now VSCode is still the best I’ve found for it.
Every time I change developer tools it's because the one I've been using has become bloated with add-ons as part of the install. When the installer has options for choosing packages, they aren't granular enough to be worthwhile. So the IDE becomes a hinderance, using memory, CPU, and screen real estate intrusively. JetBrains is there now, but it still has better language support for my needs than anything else more lightweight. I use VS Code for everything unless I absolutely need to fire up JetBrains.
> So the IDE becomes a hinderance, using memory, CPU, and screen real estate intrusively.
The screen space used is highly configurable, but if it wasn't, I'd agree. I don't care about memory or CPU at all.
Maybe it's different for other languages, I mostly do PHP + JS/HTML/CSS, but PHPStorm vs vscode (+ plugins for both) is not even close, and PHPStorm makes me so much more productive and takes so much annoyance out of my day that investing in a beefier machine seems like a small price to pay. I've easily made that money back once a month just because I get more done.
I like vscode, but I pretty much exclusively use it as a text editor and notepad.
PHPStorm gives you so much, it feels like too much because it takes forever to load.
Developing with php should feel fast. I feel like phpstorm slows me down. I like sublime, it opens the last project in .5 seconds. For me ctrl-p start typing is usually quicker than scrolling down a tree structure.
I want to use phpStorm daily again but it gives me zend eclipse flashbacks. I wish they offered a light verson.
You might be having a different usage pattern than me. I typically work on only a few projects in a day, and I have those open in parallel and switch between windows.
It's a shared process, so they're not each taking up resources (I wish that was changeable, since they've had and continue to have some annoying bugs around it).
And VS code with C++ is downright horrid, almost nothing works properly using the official C++ extensions. Yes it autocompletes and it sometimes manages to find the right files when you switch header/source, but that's about it.
I still use it at work though because we don't have CLion there and that code base does not use CMake, but only because it is just slightly better than plain VIM with some plugins. But compared to CLion + CMake it's just one small step beyond a glorified text editor.
It does work when you needs something light weight - but it often craps out on large projects - ironically it slows down way more than the IDEs. For example I'm writing a Flutter/Dart project ATM - the VS code plugin becomes unusable after a while of working on the project even on a relatively small ~30kloc project. IDEA works just fine and has much better tools.