In these years of development (I mainly use JS, nodeJS, PHP) I tried various platforms to write code, I wanted to find the best solution that would help me in my work and allow me flexibility.
I tried NetBeans, Eclipse, Coda, SublimeText, Atom, Brackets, PHPStorm/WEBStorm..
Each of these had advantages and disadvantages and these “flaws” pushed me every time to change and try a new platform.
IDE or Editor?
On this question I know that many could unleash 😂.
The opinion that led me to choose an editor and in particular VsCode, (nothing detracts that being always looking for the best platform I could change soon 😅) is that an IDE while being very convenient (it has everything you need in one window) may not be at the top on all the tools that a person uses and so I prefer to go to specific tools for specific areas such as for example:
- Postman: for the part of API REST
- DBeaver: for the DB part
- Sourcetree or GitKraken: for git management (although VsCode has a great plugin for that!)
- FileZilla: as FTP service
This led me to choose (after years of using PHPStorm) an editor.
Why (for now) I chose VsCode
When I tried a new platform my points of choice are:
- Ignition speed (up&running)
- File rendering speed
- Installable Plugins
- Ease of customization
- Data and Settings Sync
The main point of choosing VSCode was its speed (up&running) and its fluidity in processing large files.
VSCode has a huge plugin ecosystem and many of them are made.
Some of these remedies shortcomings in the core editor, but they are also its strong point to stay lean and fast.
I for example use (I will mention only the main ones):
- GitLens
- Beauty
- Bracket Pair Colorizer
- Code spell Checker
- Darcula Theme
- HTML CSS support
- Markdown preview
- Path intellisense
- PHP Debug
- Chrome debugger
- Prettier code formatter
- Polacode
- Terminal
What didn’t convince me about the other platforms
I mention only some of the platforms used, the most recent
SublimeText
Nice, comfortable, but only as editor (it replaced Notepad++ well)
A more extreme use made me see some limits
Atom
I used it after SublimeText, because it was much faster and more intuitive, the plugins were not missing and I really liked the fact that it was based on Electron.
The difficulties
With PHP it didn’t allow me to navigate through the code
Very large files (by rows and size) were struggling to open
Opening the editor no always fast (although as a computer I had a macbook pro 13" with 8GB of ram, SSD and i5)
PHPStorm / WEBStorm
Definitely a rich and complete ecosystem.
I had a great time for a long time, fluid, fast and with a lot of tools (but I was struggling to use them).
The difficulties
Some mechanisms for certain actions not intuitive and too “elaborate” (eg: debugging)
Many plugins sometimes not too well made
Cost of license
The license factor definitely played a point in VSCode’s favor.
For those who instead want an IDE with all the ecosystem useful to program (there is also the integrated DB part!) this is for them!
Conclusion
I want to point out that the “defects” for the platforms that I discarded over time may have been improved or corrected over time, I rely on what I saw during my use.
These considerations are personal, but I wanted to write them to give future developers some choice.
A greeting
Thank you!
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