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Discussion on: An Honest Comparison of VS Code vs JetBrains - 5 Points

 
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Shai Almog

Yes, that's correct. Notice that it's still the same project so the core is open source. The language specific permutations are proprietary. Some are free for use at some levels (e.g. PyCharm) but AFAIK webstorm costs money.

When I was a student we used Turbo Pascal so I have no idea if there's free versions for students.

I think paying for professional tools is a benefit not a problem. Free tools mean no support. We pay for Ultimate and get amazing support both in the plugin development dept. as well as IDE issues. With VSCode I feel we always need to find the problem on our own.

As a plugin developer the difference is very stark. There are basic things I just can't do in VSCode. E.g. a text field with code completion. AST of the currently edited file. Complex widgets within a dialog (we had to use HTML). Ability to add a custom rendered UI directly into the source editor... All of those things are doable in JetBrains but we couldn't find a workable way to do them in VSCode.