But laggy and cluttered. It’s like the Las Vegas of editors.
I always feel compelled to come and hang out on these threads as I really don’t understand the VS Code love, but I try to as surely I’m missing something…..
I switched from ST to VSC due to a few omissions and bugs in ST (don't know if they're still there).
VSC is not a speed demon but it's fast enough (I think there is a certain audience who loves to hate this; JetBrains products are measurably slow, but nobody ever complains about it). I have the suspicion that plugins may impact the experience.
The main layout is very simple (besides the status bar, but that takes very little) and almost anything can be bound to a key combination, so one can reach everything very efficiently (for example, even if the sidebar changes to something undesired, it's possible to switch to Explorer via key binding).
The major problems I've found with Ruby on VSC are:
1. VSC's built-in support for Ruby is just terrible - indentation is broken, and based on the bug tracker, they have no interesst in fixing it.
2. Solargraph is unusable for projects of even moderate complexity - it's extremely slow and inefficient, to the point of hanging in some cases.
It’s probably because it isn’t laggy or cluttered for many of us. I do think its usefulness depends a lot on which tools you’re working with and what sort of VSC plugins are available for them.
One or the things we really like about VSC is how “easy” you can “enforce” opinionated coding styles and tool setups through sharing the .vscode configurations directly in your repositories. We’re not too fascist about it. The opinions are semi-democratically decided and you’re free to override them to some degree. But because our deployment pipelines are in fact fascists, it’s very helpful to have those “global” settings at times. Like when we’re onboarding new developers, or when we’re using external consultants. Because it lets anyone just jump in and build code the way everyone else does.
Now, from the sound of things getting your VSC groove on with Ruby isn’t as easy as it is with something like Typescript. Which leads me back to the thing about tooling. Because VSC is certainly better for some things. Even something like C# which is getting good in VSC, is still “better” in VS. You’re probably very likely to use VSC for C# as VS sort of sucks, in our team only one person is still clinging on to VS as an example, but it all comes down to support.
Now, my VSC isn’t slow or laggy, but it can be. I have a couple of extensions that are just horrible for performance, but I tend to turn them off any time I’m not using them to avoid this. Similarly you’re going to need to know your way around the settings to get it to really fit your needs and you’re probably not going to have a good time if you sort of “google” configure your VSC because many of the guides are absolute trash. As it is with many things, it’s very hard to tell the trash from the gold, so the only way will often involve reading the manual. You can get away with not doing that for most usage with common languages, but for power use you’re eventually likely to have to dig into Microsoft’s horrible documentation.
If you predominantly work in TypeScript, for the web, there's no better editor.
It's faster & "lighter" than any JetBrains product, but has excellent "auto-complete" that's fairly intelligent / context aware, while still being almost as fast / lightweight as Sublime. Use with ESLint + Prettier, with format on save enabled and you tend to fly through typing TypeScript.
It does pretty well for React Native too, it's reasonably good for JavaScript, and pretty poorly for anything else (Go, Ruby, PHP, Java / Kotlin, Swift / Objective-C), C/C++/C#.
I would not say I love it, but it is free, and does what is needed out of the box.
The real selling point is the plugins, notably the Remote Development extension. This lets you locally run the IDE while the code runs/lives on a remote (SSH/Docker) host which could be beefier or specific hardware. Complete game changer that I now find impossible to do without.
If you want, I could give a list of inexcusable grievances that are maintained to this day. My favorite would be this: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/40233 . From the outside, would only take a handful of lines to read two configuration files instead of one. Open for six years.
I was just about to say the Remote extension (proprietary to Microsoft so you can’t install it in the VSCode derived editors) is the killer feature.
It allows me to leave my MacStudio at the office and work from a lower powered laptop at home (using Tailscale to connect) and everything feels like it’s running locally (it seems to run a service on the remote machine that indexes your files so the fuzzy file opener and full project search feel as fast as if they were running locally).
I have tried CodeServer on the remote machine (VSCode open-source in a browser) but that seems to get random pauses (presumably GC or something like that).
If anyone knows of something similar available outside of VSCode I’d love to hear about it.
I dropped Sublime after they pushed upgrade to 4 without asking and without (at least initially) allowing for cheap upgrade. So suddenly from having paid version I became user of trial without easy way of going back to 3. The fun part is that I would probably move to 4 at some point in time but I was forced and I didn't liked it.
I really don’t get the VS Code love.
It’s fine as a free editor.
But laggy and cluttered. It’s like the Las Vegas of editors.
I always feel compelled to come and hang out on these threads as I really don’t understand the VS Code love, but I try to as surely I’m missing something…..