Chris Bongers

Posted on Aug 5, 2022 • Originally published at daily-dev-tips.com

I stopped using Visual Studio Code

#programming #webdev

Not because it's bad, not at all, and to be fully honest, I use it for my blog still 🤫.

But because I started using Webstorm, a JetBrains product and love it.

Let me explain why I love this one so much. There are a couple of game-changing elements to it.

Full-power but fully customizable

I think the first time, I was overwhelmed by all the panels, menus, and actions.

However, you quickly realize they do have a use, but until you learn about that, you can remove panels to make it a super clean editor.

Example of the basic editor opening up.

All in - Out of the box

One of the great features of Visual Studio Code is that it has so many amazing plugins available to make your experience better.

When I downloaded WebStorm, I looked for amazing plugins but quickly realized you don't even need them.

It has so many great things already installed out of the box that you rarely need a plugin.

And if you do, their plugin ecosystem is also huge.

Some examples of things that work out of the box:

All JavaScript autocomplete and can even fix issues for you
Smart refactoring
Testing!
Fast file search and global search
Live share build-in
Tailwind classes autocomplete
Amazing themes
Source control included
and much more

If you need a plugin, check out the plugin repo on the Jetbrains website.

Search works

The cool part about WebStorm is that it has perfect search functionality.

We can search for either file and actions using the double shift search.
This is a powerful way to find files by name, actions, plugins, etc.

Alternatively, we get find-in files, which can be used to find any code in your files!
Again super powerful search functionality.

Tests

If you are writing a lot of tests, WebStorm has your back!
It provides a super robust testing flow, where you can quickly test singular test cases and even quick-view snapshots.

It's super easy to test single tests or files.
You can even quickly debug your tests in WebStorm.

Code inspection

Another great option it comes with is code inspection, and this has many incredible benefits to it.

It can quickly detect any issues you might have with your ESLint rules and unused methods.

It will also tell you when you are doing things that don't make sense, like not including alt tags on images.

And the list goes on of code inspection it can do to help you write robust code.

Speed

Another great thing about WebStorm is that it's simply super quick.
It runs projects without hesitation and has no issue refactoring a widely used import.

Since I started using WebStorm, it hasn't had a single issue (about three months now).

VSC was also pretty fast to me, but WebStorm feels a bit more stable. I had VSC crash on me before, especially while opening large files or refactoring widely used imported files.

Conclusion

I'm not here to tell you that you have to switch.
Just sharing why I switched and what benefits I see in WebStorm.

The obvious con is that it's a paid product compared to VSC, which is free.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

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Top comments (166)

leob • Aug 5 '22 • Edited

Okay lol, well actually I made exactly the opposite journey - I started with a Jetbrains product, then switched to VSCode, and never looked back.

For me VSCode was a breath of fresh air, lightweight, quick to fire up, quick to create a project (well you actually don't "create a project" anymore - BIG advantage) - easy to set up, easy to learn, easy to use, etc.

Actually I have a Java background and had to use Eclipse for years, which is the most baroque and complicated IDE you can imagine (barring the horrible Apple Xcode environment, lol). Never again that, just give me an editor (which is what VSCode is, a glorified editor), the command line, and that's it.

I get it that WebStorm is more feature-rich and way more sophisticated, but I'm not using all those features - KISS, quick and simple does it for me.

Even my VSCode is rather bare-bones - I'm keeping the number of plugins to a minimum, no fancy themes or a gazillion plugins for me - it only slows me down ... the biggest "investment" I did in VSCode was to learn the keyboard shortcuts - virtually ALL of them - because it makes you SO much more productive.

Ultimately the point is that VSCode clicks with the way I work, but I completely understand that WebStorm might click with the way someone else works.

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

I think that's kind of key.
VSC with no plugins == fast, but once you start adding stuff it becomes so slow.

To me all those things seem to work perfectly fine in WS out of the box.

leob • Aug 5 '22 • Edited

Right, that's the point, WS is batteries included, plug 'n' play, while VSCode is more DYI ... but I have a minimal number of plugins installed, and I checked right now and I even uninstalled 4 or 5 plugins that I never use, lol.

But, you mentioned search, and I do like the full-text search in VSCode quite a lot - it's fast enough and well, it's simple, there we go again haha ;)

mikeyGlitz • Aug 5 '22

The biggest selling feature for vs code for me is development containers. I think it simplifies contribution. Clone the project. Start the container. You don't have to waste time installing SDKs and plugins because they're in the container.

leob • Aug 5 '22

Oh yeah that's a good one, and you can even run your VSCode completely "in the cloud", and access it with a thin client (browser) - because well, VSCode is of course "just" a web app (packaged with Electron) ...

Imagine that you're on holiday on a tropical island, you think of a cool little feature, you open your tablet under the shade of a palm tree, and with a few clicks you fire up your IDE and your dev containers - and bada bing bada boom there it is, you do a little bit coding, with another click you deploy it - job done, back to the swimming pool - how cool is that?

mikeyGlitz • Aug 5 '22

Well I'd argue you'd still need a good CI environment for the deployment aspect. GH Actions and GitLab are pretty good for that imo, but I get what you're saying.

Ishan Tiwari • Aug 6 '22

That's why I am a full time Sublime texter now with Sublime merge.

mikeyGlitz • Aug 5 '22

I'm not sure if that's a limitation of Electron (JavaScript for desktop) that VS Code is built on

Kyle Johnson • Aug 16 '22

Performance is a journey, not a sprint. :) Look how long it took for VS to become fast.

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE • Aug 5 '22

Me too :)

Himanshu Goel • Aug 7 '22

I can second that claim. Even I also used WebStorm in past, but facing issue with over-consuming of RAM memory and getting unresponsive. After moving to VS Code, it felt so much light weighted and sleek.

Chris Bongers • Aug 8 '22

Sounds like a lot of people see it that way.
From what I can tell it also seems to make a difference wether it's mac/windows editions.

Scott Palmer • Aug 7 '22 • Edited

I’m also a Java developer that isn’t impressed with Eclipse. (I use NetBeans.). But I’ve found VSCode for Java is quite a pain. It doesn’t follow conventions and pollutes my project directory with another set of compiled classes in som bin folder or something - why??? It has trouble figuring out the classpath, so the functionality it is supposed to have is usually unavailable. Given that’s I’m doing a lot of mixed web and Java stuff these days I was hoping for a better experience. The HTLM/CSS/JS stuff in VSCode seems to work reasonably well.

leob • Aug 7 '22 • Edited

I wouldn't use VSCode for Java, I'd use Eclipse or something like that - even though I dislike Eclipse, it does work quite well for Java.

VSCode is simple and lightweight, Java is anything but - the requirements of Java are so specific, VSCode was not designed for that.

I'm not really doing Java dev anymore, but if I did I'd probably use Eclipse ... or maybe Netbeans, or alternatively a JetBrains product.

JoelBonetR 🥇 • Aug 5 '22

+1 here. Ditched webstorm apart in fabour of VSCode 😅

Gianluca Tessarolo • Aug 18 '22 • Edited

Java development ? Netbeans is my first choice, IntelliJ Idea the second, I've tried VS Code without success... (Java EE applications packaged as EAR with multiple modules)

leob • Aug 18 '22

VSCode is NOT suitable for Java development ... doesn't mean that VSCode is bad, but Java development has very specific requirements, and VSCode wasn't designed for that ... use Eclipse, use Netbeans, use IntelliJ, but don't use VSCode for Java development.

Daniel Hillmann • Aug 9 '22 • Edited

It feels like you knew everything I wanted to write

leob • Aug 10 '22

Haha okay, I suppose a lot of people migrating to VSCode have the same kind of experience with it :-)

Jeremiah S • Aug 12 '22 • Edited

Yeah. I used to use phpstorm and webstorm. I use vscode for most of the development I do these days. Also with its api and extensive repository of community developed extensions you can really customize your experience and the tools that are available.

leob • Aug 13 '22

Absolutely ... and it's lightweight, that's probably the biggest thing for me :)

Roger • Aug 16 '22

Easy to set up, easy to learn, easy to use, etc. Nice Bro !!

Comment deleted

Julia 👩🏻‍💻 GDE • Aug 5 '22

An article I HAD to read. Wow, I started with WebStorm but then switched to VSCode for the front end and wouldn't go back. But I use IntelliJ Edu for the backend when I write Java, and I would also try PyCharm and the other products because I like JetBrains Academy.

It's so interesting what developers prefer and for what reasons. Thanks for pointing out the benefits you see.

snaidamast • Aug 6 '22

I am currently using PyCharm Community Edition to bring myself up to speed with Python (I am a VB.NET\C# engineer). I love it for its feature set...

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

I've probably used most IDE's out there, but for my personal needs at this time of my career WebStorm has too many advantages I haven't seen elsewhere.

(Biggest being the test I think actually)

rxliuli • Aug 5 '22

Another more obvious disadvantage is that it is not suitable for large monorepo repositories, such as those in a company with more than 90 sub-projects, it becomes almost unusable. Also, I'm still a paid user of jetbrains ide now, but I've completely switched to vscode for the front end.

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

I'm actually finding the opposite with webstorm, way more stable on larger projects from my side 🤯

rxliuli • Aug 5 '22 • Edited

Maybe your project is not big enough, here is a basic overview of our project information

Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeScript                    1054          10239          17515          79359
Vuejs Component                275           3137           2608          41652
JavaScript                      11           2816            288          16483
HTML                             8             43              0           3245
LESS                            19            223             12           2099
GraphQL                         32             71             37           1871
JSON                            51              1              0           1433
SVG                             81              1              3            992
CSS                             15            116             11            984
SCSS                             5             19              8            186
Bourne Shell                     1             12              8             31
Markdown                         1              5              0              6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          1553          16683          20490         148341
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

This is the project I mainly work on github.com/dailydotdev/apps.

Surprised VSC works moire stable for you.
But happy to hear you found a good IDE that works for your setup.

Mike Talbot ⭐ • Aug 5 '22

I'm all for Webstorm, especially since they upgraded it to be a full IDE - it used to not have multiple projects and all that jazz and I had to use IntelliJ - but that has a lot of Java bloat you don't need.

I find Webstorm super fast, the integrated debugger is very slick, but the "it always finds it" search anywhere is a killer feature for me. The other great features are the really powerful refactorings that mean I build much cleaner code. The multi language support for SQL, GraphQL etc with all of the intellisense means I'm rarely looking things up.

I've used VSCode a fair amount and I do like it, but it never seems to be 100% consistent for me.

The new wave of JetBrains IDEs are coming. I'm very excited to see where this takes them.

A nod to DataGrip and Rider too - really great IDEs for C#, C++ and databases. I'm a happy customer and have been for 5 or 6 years now.

spO0q 🐒🎃 • Aug 5 '22

The "Storm suite" is amazing. It's not exactly the cheapest service, but it's totally worth it. I think you're right to switch to a more specialized IDE that fits your needs.

What I don't appreciate in VSCode is the telemetry enabled by default. It collects lots of data. Of course, you can disable tracking in the settings, but most users won't do it.

I'm not that surprised, considering it's a Microsoft product. For those who look for an alternative, there's also VS codium, which is an open-source clone.

Renan Franca • Aug 7 '22

Thank you! I disable telemetry 👏

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

I also used Atom before, cool product, but also started to crash almost daily 😅
For me WebStorm solves all my problems at this point in my career, so very happy with it.

spO0q 🐒🎃 • Aug 5 '22

It's VS codium.

AfterNoonPM • Aug 10 '22

Yeah, atom does that sometimes.
Also github decided to sunset(discontinue) it, so they're archiving the repo in december. Kinda sad, especially because I had finally found an editor I liked, but after the announcement, I switched to vscode, and it's working great!

Ben Sinclair • Aug 5 '22

we get find-in files, which can be used to find any code in your files!

Is there something special about this that I'm missing? I haven't use VSCode much, but I'd assume it'd have something that does this, it's pretty basic functionality available in most editors or IDEs, isn't it?

Fyodor • Aug 5 '22

The search flow is very smooth, switching between file-level, folder-level and project-level search is superfast, and the feature of “search anything” is just superb. The pleasure comes with practice 😄 but it’s really hard to use anything other than WebStorm after using WebStorm.

Ben Sinclair • Aug 5 '22

What would be the difference between "search anything" and "project-level"? Or do you mean that the search includes results from the editor, like the command pallette or something?

Fyodor • Aug 5 '22 • Edited

Yes, closer to the VS Code’s command palette but less chaotic I’d say

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

Ah nothing new, it just works really well in WS
As where VSC has the same, but it's in one uniform search.

This really comes down to preference I think.

modelair • Dec 18 '22

one of many things why i dont use vsc it's a chrome-based engine.
chrome engine and speed? lal. lightweight? omg

vsc - bullshit

FJones • Aug 5 '22 • Edited

I'm very much a JetBrains evangelist these days, too. The wealth of out-of-the-box features in all of their IDEs is excellent for someone like me who works with a bunch of different languages.
VSCode requires a lot of setup, and setting it up for everything at the same time just bogs it down massively. Meanwhile the JetBrains IDEs are all fully functional, fast, and just work.

Edit: Also, the coherency of keyboard shortcuts and the entire UX between the different IDEs vastly outperforms anything a wealth of VSC plugins would achieve. It's tailored exactly the right way.

DimitrisBor • Aug 5 '22

Many times i come across blog posts like "40 must have plugins for VSCode" that Intellij has built in and i'm like, what the heck? I understand that it gives you the choice to customize it as you want, but if i had to switch now to VS Code i would have to search and find all the plugins i need to have the same functionality.

Chris Bongers • Aug 5 '22

Yeah true,

I started thinking I needed to load all kinds of plugins into WS, learning quickly it was all ready built-in.

To me VSC also get's way slower with every plugin you add-on.
Pretty sure if you would mimic WS functionality with plugins it's un-runable. (but this is just a thought)