Have you tried IntelliJ products?

I have, and previous to that I was a big fan of Komodo IDE. One weird feature that I love from both VSCode and Komodo is the ability to open a folder as a project, no need for an actual project file or other IDE specific handling of it that older style IDEs always seemed to a require. The feature set of the IntelliJ products are quite excellent of course, but for whatever reason my need for some weird IDE-editor hybrid where the filesystem is what matters, not the project, always meant I bounced off them.

I regularly open folders as projects and the intellij (pycharm in my case) IDE creates it as a project without hassle. Just add a bit of a script to cleanup any ide project cruft it creates and I'd say you're mostly there. Compared to all I get from a real ide, VSCode is like a stone age dinosaur.

Sounds horrible. Just let me open a folder without it being a project or having to use a script to clean up stuff (wtf?).

I use an IntelliJ IDE and open folders all the time and it's never created any cruft to clean up. I think that only shows up if you start making project configurations (like file watchers to run preprocessors for web languages)

It still makes a .idea folder to add to .gitignore or clean up, just as .vscode makes a .vscode folder.

I don't see this as a lot different than MacOS spraying .DS_STORE files everywhere. It's not a big deal to add to .gitignore, but it does leave a fingerprint. It's just that tries to determine reasonable defaults if the path doesn't exist instead of Netbeans/Eclipse/whatever forcing you to pick them with a wizard if you want any of the "real" features to work.

VS Code creates a project though: .vscode folder.

Only if you make workspace-specific settings changes.

or be forced to bend to their idea of what a project is and which build tools I need to be using, I concur 100%.

Yeah, half of my coworkers used to be on CLion (for Rust). TBH I couldn't get past the fact that it reminds me of Java IDEs with too many things going on. What's better compared to VSCode?

VSCode is very, very bare bones compared to what JetBrains can offer in terms of refactoring, debugging, and code analysis (for major languages).

It's hard to start at anything specific :)

Absolutely, and I wonder how people who are not professional in both IDEs can compare. Typically VSCode + plugins + some additional software from old time like BeyondCompare etc. poorly make up Intellij's core functionality.

I haven't seen a single person who seriously used both and went back.

Search, VCS, keymapping, defaults, heuristics, refactoring wide of use, AI-based autocompletion - there's simply no real adversary.

Last time I was blasted when copying an old DB to a one in a new DB it correctly guessed the renamed columns based partly on type and size, partly on column names.

Also I love its suggestions so much that when learning a new language I always look at Jetbrains' respective autosuggestions - simply because it makes me a better programmer, faster.

Not for Rust tho. VSCode+Rust Analyzer offers an amazing experience and I found it to be on-par if not better than IntelliJ/Clion with a much more responsive editing, startup times and task customization.

For Rust I found CLion to have no improvement over VS Code.

Considering that JetBrains doesn't use rust-analyzer I have a hard time imagining that it's better, more that it's worse :o

Yes me too. I started with basic and then up through Microsoft products, swore off them for emacs for years and am now on vs code cause it works so damn well. That in itself says how well it works.

30 IDEs seems like a lot. Could you share why have you switched between so many? Could you list several specific points that make VSCode preferable over emacs.

I guess I’ve been programming since I was very young, so I went through a lot of horrible things like frontpage, dreamweaver, notepad++, and then a number of them per language (phpstorm, and other php IDEs, java IDEs, etc.)

The biggest selling point for me for vscode is good defaults (I like vanilla configurations to get started fast on new machines) and discoverability. I want to be able to install 10 plugins and try all of them in a few minutes, and learn shortcuts as I use the plugin (with emacs each extension is an investment)

Agreed, on approachable defaults for VSCode.

I found use-package, try elisp packages make it easy to try new packages in emacs.

https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

https://github.com/larstvei/Try