Re:The Era of Visual Studio Code
by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @05:07AM
(#24564737)
I've switched between IDE's and "lighter" editors like Sublime Text and VS Code so many times now (and I can't get used to vim and co, I'm too young I guess lol).
IDE's helped me so much writing Java code; refactorings, autocomplete, code generation etc are features that never became as good in 'lighter' editors.
Then the JS era appeared, and IDE's couldn't really do much with it - in part due to its unstructured setup, lack of importing code, lack of namespaces. Autocomplete and jump-to-definition was non-existent. I switched to Sublime Text for web work, and relied heavily on the powerful and fast global search and cmd+p navigation for a good while.
Over time, things changed; JS got modules, JS got types (or type inference) through projects like Flow and Typescript, and JS got richer with e.g. JSX. Still mainly used VS Code (by then) for front-end though; heavier editors didn't seem to offer enough added value to warrant the switch.
But every time I did back-end work I would switch back to a proper IDE. Java / JVM languages are things I never did in a lightweight editor. Go (which I use as a back-end language currently) support was rough for a good while in both editors and IDEs, but it's getting there.
In my current job, I handle four languages over two projects; there's the legacy project, PHP and JS / Dojo, and the new one, Go and TS / React. I've fully switched to using an IDE again; intellij's JS / TS support is good enough, and honestly for the legacy codebase I need it. The codebase is nearly 10 years old, and the 'hip' editors simply don't support PHP 5 or 13.000 line spaghetti messes. But intellij does; I configured it for PHP 5.2 specifically (so if I use the shorthand array syntax it flags it up) and ES5, it struggles a bit but it can make sense of the huge files, and it helps me a lot in making sense of it. It's a safety net that the codebase and language itself doesn't give me.
VS Code and co wouldn't come close.
Anyway I still switch to VS Code from time to time for one-off tasks, quick edits, formatting, etc.
IDE's helped me so much writing Java code; refactorings, autocomplete, code generation etc are features that never became as good in 'lighter' editors.
Then the JS era appeared, and IDE's couldn't really do much with it - in part due to its unstructured setup, lack of importing code, lack of namespaces. Autocomplete and jump-to-definition was non-existent. I switched to Sublime Text for web work, and relied heavily on the powerful and fast global search and cmd+p navigation for a good while.
Over time, things changed; JS got modules, JS got types (or type inference) through projects like Flow and Typescript, and JS got richer with e.g. JSX. Still mainly used VS Code (by then) for front-end though; heavier editors didn't seem to offer enough added value to warrant the switch.
But every time I did back-end work I would switch back to a proper IDE. Java / JVM languages are things I never did in a lightweight editor. Go (which I use as a back-end language currently) support was rough for a good while in both editors and IDEs, but it's getting there.
In my current job, I handle four languages over two projects; there's the legacy project, PHP and JS / Dojo, and the new one, Go and TS / React. I've fully switched to using an IDE again; intellij's JS / TS support is good enough, and honestly for the legacy codebase I need it. The codebase is nearly 10 years old, and the 'hip' editors simply don't support PHP 5 or 13.000 line spaghetti messes. But intellij does; I configured it for PHP 5.2 specifically (so if I use the shorthand array syntax it flags it up) and ES5, it struggles a bit but it can make sense of the huge files, and it helps me a lot in making sense of it. It's a safety net that the codebase and language itself doesn't give me.
VS Code and co wouldn't come close.
Anyway I still switch to VS Code from time to time for one-off tasks, quick edits, formatting, etc.