[john-titor]

Can someone explain the hype around VSCode to me? I looked into it about a year ago and was immediately turned-off by the overwhelming amount of features that they throw at you right in the 'beginner's tour'.

What I appreciate about Atom is that it is very simple right out of the box and does not get in your way. You cold always beef it up with packages later, but that progression is much more pleasant to me than the VSCode approach.

The biggest selling point of Atom to me as a Python dev was the Hydrogen package. That tight integration of notebook features within the editor is something I have never seen before and a total game changer. Especially if you are working with data that you might need to visualize a lot. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand there is no Hydrogen equivalent in VSCode? Sure, there are plug-ins that let you run your code through a jupyter kernel and display the output in a second terminal pane, but that is not the same as the ability to simply highlight a bit of code, run that and have the results displayed immediately on the next line below. Having pyplot figures displayed in such a way is also not possible from what I saw, or did I miss something?

[seoaeu]

The killer feature of VS Code for me is that when you open a source file for python, or C++, or whatever it pops up a dialogue: “would you like to install the extension for this file type?”. Click that and you’ve got working IDE features for that language with none of the hassle of tracking down which is the right extension, how do I keep my plugins up to date, which dependencies do I have to install first, etc.

[hbn]

In my experience, it works up to the point where it installs the extensions, and then it does a bunch of processing and still can't figure out how to run the project or what the code means anyway. Plus I now have a slew of new extensions installed, and I'm not sure which are new looking in my list of extensions.

IntelliJ has a pretty damn good track record for me, when I import a project it indexes for a minute or so, then it automatically knows the entrypoint to run the project, and has a fantastic understanding of all my code. Cmd+click any symbol and it can show me definitions, usages, implementations, etc. I can hit shift+F6 to rename a symbol, and it hits every usage perfectly (as opposed to every time I've tried to use VS Code to rename something, and it just causes me more problems than if I were to do it manually). I haven't found any other text editor or IDE that works as seamlessly in this regard, and it's a dealbreaker for my productivity.

[TillE]

And then you spend an hour figuring out how to configure the extension, and it's still clunky.

I like VS Code just fine as a text editor, but as an IDE Visual Studio is so much better, even for CMake projects.