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Uriel Bitton
Uriel Bitton

Posted on • Edited on

What IDE do you use for coding and why?

People of DEV! What is your favorite IDE for coding and why? What are the features you like most?

P.s. I am trying to compare ide's and open to trying new ones!

Oldest comments (87)

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soumyaranjannaik profile image
Soumya Ranjan Naik

I use Vscode for almost all of my stuff sometimes I use android studio for flutter except that everything else on vscode.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

cool. Is vscode heavy or slow to load? I often see it has advanced features but due to its size it loads slowly. Is that true?

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

It's somewhere in the middle ... a bit heavier than an editor like VIM, but much more lightweight than big IDEs like IntelliJ, Eclipse or Netbeans ... after you've started it once (which takes a little bit more time, but not that much even) then follow up sessions are typically very quick to start (you can just open files or directories from the command line, like code readme.txt or code .).

So overall I certainly wouldn't say it loads slowly, it always feels quite snappy to me.

You use Brackets, right? Well I think they would be comparable, both built with web tech (HTML, CSS, JS) ... is it also an Electron app?

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

Interesting!
Yes I use brackets for web dev and eclipse for Java and c++. Ecipse is definitely too heavy for quick use.
Brackets I like bc of the live preview feature. And its super light. The only thing is its predictive text for html isn't the best. But the prediction for css is great.
So I'm just exploring anything new to try and compare to brackets which I've been using for years

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leob profile image
leob

Haven't used Brackets but I can imagine it would be quite comparable to VSCode ... maybe because Brackets is from Adobe it has more of an emphasis on design, VSCode doesn't really have that.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

You should give brackets a shot! It's 2 best features are the live preview and the inline editor - super useful.

Does vscode have live preview?

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

Not that I know of, I think VSCode users just have a separate browser window opened next to VSCode ... but what exactly is the inline editor? It sounds like Brackets really has a bit of a unique focus and some features which VSCode probably doesn't have (but maybe also the other way around).

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soumyaranjannaik profile image
Soumya Ranjan Naik

I have a live preview extension installation for webpages.

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noaccos profile image
Francesco Noacco

Yes, VSCode has a good live preview feature
It's an electron application, it is one of the features you'd just expect from your text editor running in a browser

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

Right. Thats good I guess nowadays every web dev ide has a live preview plugin.

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soumyaranjannaik profile image
Soumya Ranjan Naik

It's quite fast to load and is lighter than any other IDE like pycharm or Android studio.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

im guessing Android studio is the standard ide for developing Android apps?

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soumyaranjannaik profile image
Soumya Ranjan Naik • Edited

Actually I work on Flutter so it can be setup on VSCode or Android Studio and even native android development can be done using VSCode, I did it a while ago when I had a less powerful Intel Pentium and 4GB RAM machine now I have a I5-8300H and 8GB RAM machine which can handle all that easily so i use Android Studio.

Still if I need some quick edit or testing VSCode is my choice even for android.

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fredoist profile image
Freddy González

Maybe VS Code might take some time to load because it comes with many preinstalled features and language support. I do mostly web dev so I have disabled most of pre-built elements like C++, C#, R... language features since I'll not be programming in C. It also comes with some preinstalled themes which I have also disabled the ones that I will never use. In my opinion disabling anything that you will not be using could increase the loading speed.

To disable built-in features and themes you can go to the extensions panel Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+X and type in the search bar @builtin and just disable the ones that you will not use.

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

Spacemacs mostly. I like how I can do everything using just a keyboard. It's also very important that it does not force me to remember 1000 keyboard shortcuts, but also offers a command palette. I like the configurability, even though I'm sure I'm not squeezing even 50% our if it. Magit is cool, there's no better git integration IMO.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

Github integration is nice!
How is it in terms of general workflow? is it good with suggesting variable names, html tags and etc?

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

It's good enough for me, but I'm mostly work with Ruby, so the bar is not set very high ;) For sure it works great with Elixir too. And I don't really use it at large scale for other languages.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

ok i wanted to start learning elixir actually, so ill give spacemacs a try!

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Akshay090

How is it compared to vim.
Ps. I don't intent to start the war, just curious as vim was had for me to get used to, and i don't know anything about spacemacs or emacs

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katafrakt profile image
Paweł Świątkowski

My problem with Vim was always that you start from scratch and you need to build your own IDE from zero. Unlike with actual programming, I don't like that with tooling. Spacemacs gives me solid and out-of-the-box working defaults which are a bit bloated of course, but then I can gradually cut off things and configure others to my liking. Now, I know there's SpaceVIM nowadays, but it wasn't available (or I just didn't know that) when I picked Spacemacs. Otherwise I'd probably end up using it.

I still use Vim for editing single files and other ad hoc tasks though.

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tomsfernandez profile image
Tomas Fernandez

Intellij mainly, the best tool out there (all the Jetbrains products). If I need something lighter I go for Sublime/VS Code

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

How would you compare it to brackets - thats what I'm using right now. Any advantages?

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recurs1v0 profile image
EPPR

Company Time

  • Coda 2 for Mac on Server Side

EPPR Virtual School Time

  • Visual Code Studio SSH directly into to a Raspberry Pi from my iPAD
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spiritupbro profile image
spiritupbro

jetbrains fosho

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

cool

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yungxix profile image
yungxix🈶

I use vscode cause it super cool....what make vscode awesome is the auto suggestion elements and it also indicate an error on ur line of code if there are any on your work

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arnu515 profile image
arnu515

I use VSCode for small web projects and Pycharm Professional (Not FREE) for python and react, like this one. I also use Webstorm for Angular and Svelte

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

cool. I believe webstorm also isn't free right?

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awfulwafflez profile image
Anna • Edited

There is a free version. You can also use the Jetbrain python plugin for intellij CE for a free version of pycharm. Compared to vscode, Webstorm is much better. It has pretty much the majority of plugins you'd want and has better code organization imo. Intellij and webstorm also has the same github integration as vscode (all though, personally I think that's irrelevant and you should learn to use git as I've seen way too many people screw up code because they tried to use the ide's github integration).

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arnu515 profile image
arnu515

Git in the command line is better than any "integration". Because in the command line, you're the one executing the commands, so you know exactly what happened

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abhineettandon profile image
Abhineet Tandon • Edited

VSCODE. It's cool. Git integration by default. Fully customisable and great for JavaScript development. I use following extensions:

Docker
DotENV
ESLint
GItLense
GraphQL
Material Icon Theme
One Dark Pro
Rainbow CSV
Fira Code Font

vscode_shot.jpg

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

Nice man! Vscode has great plugins :)

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cdsaenz profile image
Charly S.

Oh that Rainbow CSV plugin looks like something I might use. Tons of that stuff here hehe. Thanks!

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volkmarr profile image
Volkmar Rigo

I use Visual Studio, when I work on dotnet solutions. I know the shortcuts, get a good debugging experience and I've installed CodeRush which helps me to save some keystrokes. When I work with text (ex. formatting or validating json/xml), VS Code is now my text editor of choice. I switched from Notepad++.

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tcarrio profile image
Tom • Edited

VS Code and Vim, though I'm trying to use Vim more personally. I keep running into crazy issues with the number of plugins I use in VS Code, and I like the keyboard-centric experience of Vim, just never give it enough time to make it all a habit.

A lot of my work recently is done with the Remote SSH plug-in which for Vim is just running Vim over SSH. Clone Vundle and my latest dotfiles, and away I go.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

I could imagine having too many plug-ins is probably not a good idea and would slow down the app.

I've never heard of vim, is it used for web prog. or just general prog. ?

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tcarrio profile image
Tom • Edited

Vim is a terminal-based text editor which was built as an improvement upon Vi, so its roots (Vi) go back as far as the 70s, and it (Vim) was initially written in 1991. It has its own plug-in scripting language (Vimscript) but can also make calls out to other languages (Python, Node.js, etc. on the assumption you have installed them).

Being terminal-based, it's entirely keyboard driven, even moving the cursor between lines, characters, and words is done with keys. Vim is very barebones to start, it has support for syntax highlighting and the base functionality of calling commands, navigating through files or to lines, and editing text of course. However, you can install plugins for things like navigating the filesystem, autocomplete, linting, and more. Some extensions even make use of the same language server protocol that VS Code uses. So in that effect, it starts off as a general programming text editor, and can be extended to do web programming, systems programming, or any domain you care to. You can check the VimAwesome website for a list of plugins that are available to get you started (NERDTree for filesystem navigation, fugitive for awesome Git integration, and more)

Being terminal-based for me means I don't use a gigabyte of memory just opening a JavaScript file though, which for some of my devices is important. My older Surface Pro device has 4GB of memory, which chokes up once you start using VS Code as well as Chrome. It's also easier on older integrated graphics. But I'd like to keep using it as it has great touchscreen and gesture support on Ubuntu 20.04 for browsing the web and it's great for working in a terminal on the couch or in bed or at the coffee shop.

Furthermore, it's entirely free and open source code, and I don't need a proprietary version to do my work remotely (I cannot use the Remote SSH plug-in with VS Code without using their proprietary version of the product). The version of VS Code on their GitHub is actually not the same source code as what is used to compile the version you download from their website. You can check out VS Codium for a truly open source version, should you care for that kind of thing (from a security perspective, you can't know if you're safe if you don't know what you're actually running).

In all, a massively different experience from VS Code, but in many good and some bad ways. If you're a fan of the mouse, it may not be your favorite thing, and there's definitely a learning curve to a new style of navigation, but there's a lot of efficiency to be had from your hands never leaving the keyboard.

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urielbitton profile image
Uriel Bitton

cool. Thanks for that man