[addicted]

Electron apps are getting much better.

VS Code is considered the best app in its class by a distant margin and it’s an electron app.

The first round of Electron apps were created by people who were simply trying to get some cross platform native version of their apps out.

It’s only been recently that companies are now creating electron apps as first class products and now those apps are doing very well.

[troupo]

> VS Code is considered the best app in its class by a distant margin and it’s an electron app.

Yes, and by now they have spent spent hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of man-years of dev time on it. And it's still the only poster child for "good Electron app"

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The popularity of VSCode is mystifying to me: IntelliJ is a much nicer application and VSCode always ends up lagging randomly for me.

[jemmyw]

They both lag. They're both resource hogs. IntelliJ has a better out of the box experience. VSCode has a much much more diverse and interesting plugin ecosystem. I run both. VSCode is interesting in that, depending on the project and/or the plugins required for that project, it can be much kinder or much worse on my battery life. IntelliJ is more predictably bad.

All being equal I'd choose VSCode at this point. When I want to do something like run tests the test plugins for pretty much everything I've looked at are way better. IntelliJ has some powerful configuration capabilities that somehow always manage to be constrained in a sucky way. Support answers are like "oh you want to do THAT. No, you can't do that, read this doc" where the VSCode way would tend to not be as configurable but support the thing you actually wanted to do.

Plus VSCode plugins are majority free. It's not that I mind playing for plugins per se, but my experience with Intellij plugins has been poor, so I don't want to go through the hassle of paying to find out it's rubbish.

[wkat4242]

IntelliJ is very expensive and VS Code is free. That's a big driver for popularity.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

JetBrains isn’t “very expensive”: for one thing, there’s a free and open source community edition; for another, the IntelliJ license is about the same as a Netflix subscription and, rather than being a pure cost, it’s a tool that supports one’s valuable skills.

[wkat4242]

The community edition only supports Java-style languages (and python with the PyCharm version). It's no match for the huge breadth of free vscode plugins.

And it's very hard to compete with free. You really have to code a lot to make it worth it. Personally I don't usually have a Netflix subscription because of the price though I'd sometimes get it for a month or so to watch something particular.

And for work purposes it's the difference of just being able to start using it versus justifying the expense to multiple levels in the org which can be prohibitive.

I totally understand how VS Code took fight like it did with its free model.

[willsmith72]

i've found the opposite, once the codebase is large enough jetbrains ides get slower and slower. i've been on teams which had to split their monorepo because it was so bad

[palata]

Same here, I love the JetBrains IDEs.

[robertoandred]

Except VS Code is missing tons of native functionality that makes it still feel out of place.