Yep it's one of those posts where I talk about how big my hammer is 🔨 and how much it wieghs and how many nails it can hit per hour... Oh right, nobody else really talks about tools like we do in this industry.
I personally don't get attached to editors and IDEs anymore, but I can say this, vscode is astonishingly good and I have used it since beta. It has come a long way.
So you might be thinking, vscode fanboy why are you switching?
There is nothing wrong with my #vscodesetup
But I now work with 99% java developers, and most of them are comfortable with jetbrains.
I decided to make a noble sacrifice for team productivity by getting hold of Webstorm. And it's quite a lot like my vscode setup, just out of the box. Sure it's missing some of my favourite features like ... Nothing, and it's not as pretty ... without a material skin, then it is pretty. Okay so it's about the same once customized, I recommend a vscode keymap and that's it really, it's fine.
What I gain is helpability, make it easier to be helped, that's how you should consider your editor.
At home, I may still use vscode, or just go all in.
Have you ever made such choices, do you enjoy Webstorm or vscode? Maybe you think I'm an idiot, let me know in the comments 😅
Latest comments (24)
What horror have I unleashed, wildly off topic now.
👮 off topic police.
WebStorm is a powerful IDE, everything is working out of the box. WS autocomplete/refactor features are way better than in VSC. Of course, it's slower than VCS, but on a decent machine it's not so slow. Also i'm using DataGrip inside WS, so convenient.
Commercial is too expensive for me to justify at the moment, and the free version of their tools, when available, is too limited, so I never tried it properly, except for IDEA (one Java project), and Android studio, which I believe is / was built upon it (it's been a few years).
Vscode works great for my needs (Django, Vue, and docker, for the most part), so i don't really see a need to waste time learning another IDE.
But it did take me a while to settle for vscode.
Hmm going to need to look into this.
You're not an idiot, I think that's a good choice and joy. Me myself like the notepad, simple UI, not many buttons lol, and even it gives me no warnings nor errors, it's a joke ya know.
Yeah, I'm also a vscode/vscodium fan boy. But on dark theme, my plots on data science projects were really hard to watch, it mixed black point with those dark theme. So I decided to go on with Pycharm at night and vscode/vscodium at daylight. Both are good and helpful, even prevent me from boring
I've recently switched to Webstorm, due to doing a lot of work in IntelliJ (we do some Kotlin backend in my company). I was really impressed at the beginning, especially by amazing intellisense and refactoring options, but... I switched back to VS code. WS felt really slow very often and I had to restart few times a day for some weird reasons (eslint kept complaining about some issue which wasn't there anymore, and it was all right in Vscode).
Reminds me of how often I have to either
TypeScript: Restart TS serverorDeveloper: Reload Windowin VSCode. VSCode isn't that good, but I don't seem to have much choice with TypeScript.I have tried WebStorm Trial, but is yet to be impressed.
Better then continous random errors from TS, that I dont even use :D
I made the switch too about a couple weeks ago. VSCode is awesome, but I find Webstorm to be better and more helpful.
Like you said, Jetbrains aren’t missing any features that VSCode offers. Except for the aesthetics, but that’s easily fixed with a theme, I use one dark pro.
Following your footsteps, I have found only one thing that's slightly anoying.
Multiline shift or cloning sort of works but in vscode it's marginally better, I use this feature alot and will have to watch where I place my cursor.
A primary reason to use a vim keymap. I can't think of an editor that it's not an option in. It gets me 80% of the way setup and at least makes a new editor usable.
I work with PHPStorm almost exclusively (it has everything WebStorm has plus additional features). Many of my students use VSCode and the truth is: VSCode is probably the best Open-source IDE around but has two major flaws:
For one, it needs love. Out of the box, it's a disappointing set of features. You can tweak it to become a powerful companion, but the beginner will simply not take advantage of that, not spend enough time with it nor understand what it is that's missing. The second problem is that even if tweaked, it still doesn't compare with the JetBrain IDEs. Not that it's far off, but it just doesn't get close enough to be considered to be of the same value.
And given the fact that JetBrain offers countless possibilities to use their tools for free (easiest one by having a .edu email), it baffles me why they aren't in use way more.
This reminds me that I really wanna get back into Jetbrains products. I used to swear by them when I studied web development back in 2013 all the way until 2017 when I had to switch to writing C#, and Rider was not a good alternative to Visual Studio at the time. Since then, I got used to Visual Studio, but neither VS2019 nor VS Code feel as robust and "complete" and as I want them to be for straight up web development, sadly.
I think you just convinced me to grab a personnal Jetbrains subscription once again. Hopefully they ironed out the problems with Rider by now.
Seconding this. I've never had a bad experience with a Jetbrains product, and honestly don't really know why they never stuck for me. This is prompting me to try again.
On the subject I might look at clion for rust.
If you make it like what your used to it might just feel a very small amount of discomfort, but it does have some very strong Git powers.
Time is a great healer. Haha you convinced yourself, but I'm glad I reminded you. If it doesn't feel right just go back to normal.