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by wokwokwok 1006 days ago
Jetbrains has plenty of extensions (1st party, high quality plugins that are far better than some of the 1st party Microsoft plugins) and no one cares if it's by Microsoft (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?).

Honestly, I doubt most people even care it's kind-of open source (1).

> 1. Free

This is the reason most people use vscode.

That's it.

It's free, and it's pretty good.

It's not better. It's just free.

Nothing wrong with liking free stuff; free stuff is great; but don't confuse 'it didn't cost me anything' with 'it's good'.

There's a difference between value (ie. for what you paid, you got something that was worth significantly more than you paid, which in this case is zero) and quality (independent of cost, the thing is just plain old good).

vscode may be more valuable to people than jetbrains products, but it isn't a higher quality product.

There's a massive difference between those two things.

[1] - It's not open source 'technically'. https://ruky.me/2022/06/11/im-switching-form-vs-code-to-vs-c...

3 comments

> Honestly, I doubt most people even care it's kind-of open source (1).

Average users might not care. But extension authors do. Yes, of course you can write extensions for close source projects, but it'd take longer to do "hacky" things since you'll need to read decompiled code / memory stack to understand its internals. I remember a very popular extension used a private field (and later broke because VSCode changed its internal implementation).

I personally constantly check Blender's source code here and there during the development for our internal Python tools, so I suppose people who write VSCode extension sometimes do.

> (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?).

It means VScode benefits MS indirectly and they can keep it free indefinitely while being a for-profit company.

Note that IntelliJ Platform itself is open source.
>Nothing wrong with liking free stuff; free stuff is great; but don't confuse 'it didn't cost me anything' with 'it's good'.

I paid for Sublime Text 3 back in the day and still pay for Rider. I prefer VS Code to Sublime Text 3 as it's more extensible for the kinds of environments I work in, and has some decent built-in amenities like version control and debuggers.

It's not better than Rider objectively (and it's not better by design. MSFT doesn't want to cannabalize Visual Studio), but for smaller scripting and editing it runs circles around Rider. I prefer using it when I know I'm not going to be coding something complex nor for hours on end. A great complimentary tool to have on end.

But if you have a "good" alternative as this lightweight c#/c++ editor, let me know. Someone recommended Zed but that is Mac only.

There's also a free edition of Intellij - Community Edition. Why don't people use that?
I did for years and it was perfectly fine. But then I got hooked on the additional Spring configuration support that comes with the Ultimate edition But yes, IntelliJ Community edition feels very complete for a lot of programming tasks (my experience is mostly Java/Kotlin projects with a bit of web frontend & Rust on the side). It comes with debugging but not with a profiler (which I still haven't used ) So try the community edition and see if you miss anything! Chances are you won't.