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by a_wild_dandan 964 days ago
A fresh VS Code install has all the usual IDE tools I need for my job (editing, debugging, symbol parsing, etc). Is it still not an IDE? Suppose it was missing something for someone else's workflow. What if we bundled all the extensions needed for most developers into the install? Is it an IDE then? We just need less modularity/more bloat at install?

Distinguishing VS Code from IDEs seems so forced and unintuitive to me. What's the point?
3 comments
jacurtis 964 days ago
I've always described VSCode as a text editor with IDE capabilities. I would personally call it a text editor and not an IDE though. If you do a fresh install of VSCode you may notice that almost everything is a plugin. Even basic language support for popular languages like python are technically plugins. Everything you add from there are as well. A true vanilla install of VSCode is truly a text editor.

However it was designed really well in that it has a lot of good integrations which make plugins feel almost integrated and natural. Not to mention the plugin process is the smoothest i've seen of any text editor so for many people it is transparent, they just think they are enabling features and don't realize they are actually just downloading 3,000 plugins.

I'm not trying to argue a no-true-scottsman here. If people want to call it an IDE they can.

But download something from JetBrains and give that a go or something like xCode or the real Visual Studio and you'll see how deeply "integrated" it is, so that it feels like a full featured developer environment from the start, hence the IDE moniker.

There's nothing wrong with VSCode. You can do your whole job in it i'm sure. But compare it to something like JetBrains and it is really really hard to put them truly next to eachother. With enough customization you can get VSCode close, but it sure isn't like that without a lot of customization and plugins from 100 different developers with varying levels of support and reliability.

Fwiw, the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio calls it an IDE and the wikipedia page for VSCode calls it a "source code editor". So maybe as a "source code editor", thats where it bridges the gap between IDE and Text Editor.

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a_wild_dandan 964 days ago
What new feature(s) must VSCode implement to gain the moniker of "IDE", in your personal opinion?

VSCode feels pretty bog standard in the pantheon of IDEs that I've (ab)used over the decades. By default VSCode searches symbols/references, formats code, debugs, has an integrated terminal, handles source control, has smart autocomplete and snippets, etc. I've never harkened back to my days with PhpStorm/PyCharm/VS/Eclipse/CLion/etc and thought "gosh, I wish VSCode did <this-feature>".

To me, if VSCode is closer to Notepad than to NetBeans, then the "text editor" vs "IDE" distinction is virtually meaningless. Ditto for the term "source code editor." I guess it's just personal preference though.

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TheCleric 963 days ago
To me the line between editor and IDE is you don't have to leave the IDE to do anything if you don't want to. Including the thing that VS Code lacks in most cases: projects and compilation. For example, in Visual Studio you can go from "New Executable" to an actual compiled executable without leaving Visual Studio or using a terminal.

Not that I want those things in VSCode, and if I did there's likely a plugin for that. This is just where I happen to dilineate the two.

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LoganDark 964 days ago
Plus, each plugin is maintained by an independent developer and you don't know what the quality of their code is. When I tried VSCode on a Mac, the C/C++ debugger plugin panicked and terminated the process whenever I tried to set a breakpoint, because it didn't understand the format of the debugger for some reason, even though that is the same debugger that the plugin itself bundled (so they should have been verified to work together).

AFAIK there were at least 2 of such plugins available, but this was the more popular one, and I don't remember what I tried before giving up, but I do not want to be playing Linux with my IDE. I need it to actually work.

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hateful 964 days ago
But isn't Visual Studio the same? You still have to install the relevant Workloads[1].

If I suddenly want to do C++ development - I need to install it. And it's not easier than it is in VSCode.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/modif...

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dbbk 961 days ago
If VS Code is not an IDE then I don't know what an IDE is
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