I had one of those aha moments last week. I started to write to complain to Microsoft that VSCode didn't remember my previous searches when I remembered that I could just hack it in myself, which I did. Most programmers like me like that kind of control.

Honest question as I'm not really part of the open source world: 1. What happens to your change when an update comes out? (Or, do you keep up with updates) 2. Having just merged my first ever pull request, how does a project stay coherent with possibly hundreds or thousands of people submitting their 'hacks'?

My fix is just a quick hack and not polished enough to submit, so I'll just reapply it. I'm guessing that the vscode programmers will add a search history and I won't have to keep doing this.

Pull Request https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/pulls

At the very least it could be considered a vote for the feature.

Pull requests and forks, you can fork a project and keep it up to date with the master. People's hacks are not included in the source code, they're free to fork the project and implement their own hacks and submit a pull request to get their solution included as part of the master if it is approved

Jet-brains products have a gigantic plugin ecosystem that allows you to add whatever functionality you want..

Well, not everything. Language support cannot be implemented by relying on an external service (like the typescript service), it has to be implemented in a very specific way.

They are extensible, sure, but not very flexible.

The TypeScript service is not from Jetbrains, but coding assistance like type inference and auto-completion options have thus far always been this IDEs own implementation [0]:

    > This assistance can be provided either by IntelliJ IDEA itself, or based on the data from
    > the built-in TypeScript compiler, or through integration with the TypeScript Language Service.

They bundle whatever latest TS is available when the product is created or let you point to your own installation. "Use TypScript Service" is marked "experimental", so letting the IDE use the external service for things it traditionally figured out on its own to provide coding assistance is being worked on.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/typescript-suppor...

Oh, looks like I haven't re-checked recently enough - this was almost a year ago. I should give it another try...