I stopped using Visual Studio Code

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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Comments

[nyholku]

Funny thing: I've used Eclipse for IDK 15 years. I've tried to get into VSC, Atom, JetBrains but I just keep coming back.

I use it for Java and the derivatives like Code Composer Studio, MPLAB X, Visual DSP for embedded stuff.

It just works for me and has all the features that I want and does not have the features I hate.

I like auto completion for things that I don't want to remember, like all API call, but I don't need or want any help with writing the small stuff like auto completing '{' or indenting.

I hate the amount visual distraction that Jet Brains puts on the screen. I don't like that just moving my cursor a little to use it as finger to track some code pops up all kind of useless info. I could go on...but everybody has their own poison I guess. :)

[zotov]

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

vsc - bullshit

[Md. Fahim Bin Amin]

As a fellow Jetbrains fan, I can understand you completely. The only sad part is, they don't provide any free version of Webstorm (I am not considering the trial version as that would get expired within 1 month anyway). It is true that educational gmail account can unlock the premium subscriptions of all the IDEs for two years. But after then, we would not have any other choice other than using VS Code if we can't afford the IDEs. Moreover, they are very costly as well.

[Thai Nguyen]

Nothing is better than Neovim. I can work anywhere I want with just a terminal.

[sheriffderek]

I'm still very happy with Sublime Text.

[sheriffderek]

Are you saying that VSCode isn't really "free?" ;)

[Dmitry]

Jetbrains products are fast... I tryed Pycharm and Goland and both of them eat memory and resources.
They don't work with wsl correctly.

[Alfonso Carrasco]

Totalmente de acuerdo, yo también uso WebStorm y PhpStorm

[Flawnson Tong]

Really like that you highlighted a bunch of great things about JetBrains IDEs, but honestly imho this is one of those things that comes down to personal perference :P

And for the record I ust JetBrains IDEs :)

[Chris Bongers]

It sure does, it's with almost any tooling really.
I tried to highlight what works for me.

For some people other IDE's will be better and that's the cool part about it.

[Alex K.]

Another great thing about WebStorm is that it's simply super quick.

It is indeed quick for small to medium-sized projects. However once the codebase grows substantially it can become quite slow sometimes. Especially when there's more than language in the codebase, e.g. I use Goland for a large TS and Go codebase and when switching branches indexing takes ages.