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Discussion on: I stopped using Visual Studio Code

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leob profile image
leob • 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.

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hoangviethung profile image
Roger

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

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giates profile image
Gianluca Tessarolo • 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)

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leob profile image
leob

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.

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Scott Palmer • 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.

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leob profile image
leob • 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.

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Julia πŸ‘©πŸ»β€πŸ’» GDE

Me too :)

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hilleer profile image
Daniel Hillmann • Edited

It feels like you knew everything I wanted to write

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leob profile image
leob

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

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hxavs profile image
Jeremiah S • 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.

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leob profile image
leob

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

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

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.

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Kyle Johnson

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

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mikeyglitz profile image
mikeyGlitz

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

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ishanpro profile image
Ishan Tiwari

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

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leob profile image
leob • 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 ;)

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mikeyglitz profile image
mikeyGlitz

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.

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leob profile image
leob

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?

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mikeyglitz profile image
mikeyGlitz

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.

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JoelBonetR πŸ₯‡

+1 here. Ditched webstorm apart in fabour of VSCode πŸ˜…

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Himanshu Goel

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.

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

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.