What's the actual difference? As far as I can see, they're both poor text editors with bad interfaces, built on top of the horrible mess that is Electron. They're also both massive. VS Code takes up 235 MB and Atom takes a whopping 530 MB. Sublime Text is like 30 MB.
VS Code's interface is a garbage Metro (or whatever Microsoft is calling it today) implementation with sidebar hell from Office.
>Who cares about 200MB in that regard?
Who cares about anything? Just use everything you have. CPU, RAM, battery life and so on. These things are free for the developer.
Is VS Code actually seven times better and/or complex compared to Sublime Text that it actually needs to use the additional disk space.
Electron is garbage and just an exercise in providing a bad user experience to people for the sake of making front-end developers happy since they're the ones making them. The end result is bloated applications that are slow and use way too much system resources. VS Code used to use a significant portion (>10%) of the CPU just to draw a blinking cursor.
Electron is the reason you're getting these kind of desktop applications built in the first place, it's opened up an entire portal of developers to catering to your needs.
It may not be the ultimate solution to the problem with regards to things such as performance, but these are irrelevant if the application were to never be built in the alternative.
All vague overly general misrepresentations of the very specific points I made. I think the other "DAE Electron is bad?" comments can suffice without you adding.
I use VScode currently (for Python) but I'm not entirely satisfied with it.
How do you set up this very good autocomplete? The official Python plugin (by Don Jayamanne) seems kind of bad at autocomplete and related features. I get autocomplete that:
- Autocompletes random stuff because I pressed "enter" or "down"
- Tries to autocomplete comments
- If I tell it to autocomplete only on tab, then it will sometimes autocomplete and sometimes insert spaces; the faster I type, the more I get spaces
- Pops up enormous tooltips for function docstrings that are taller than my entire code window
Is the editor size an issue? For quick startup, sure, but when the tool is actually running? (Which at least on my machine, it's on most of the day anyway.)
I used to prefer lean editors (vim, Sublime), but then intellisense and plugins of VS Code won me over. That and git support and other niceties working out of the box.
> they're both poor text editors with bad interfaces
They're not poor editors. They're okay. And the interface is fine, I've actually grown to like Atom after having used it for a month. They are they're at least an order a magnitude bigger and slower than Sublime Text, yet pretty usable on a modern desktop computer. I've also used Sublime Text for three or four years on a daily basis.
If you never enjoyed the experience of a lightweight editor or was never bothered by the sluggishness of heavy weight IDEs, fine but don't blame any praise you don't understand on astroturfing.
I use both VS and VSCode and I prefer using VSCode by far.
If you never enjoyed the experience of a lightweight editor or was never bothered by the sluggishness of heavy weight IDEs
Neither Atom or VS Code are lightweight. Both feel absolutely glacial compared to those other IDEs (including even IDEA that is atop Java). This mythology that they're "light" isn't remotely founded in reality.
Regarding astroturfing, your claim is exactly the sort of claim that seems suspicious. If Visual Studio or IDEA is scary (if I was setting my son up with something simple to play around with web development), sure use something superficially simpler, but the claims of lightness are outrageously detached from reality.
Another comment mentioned a negative association with Microsoft, and I'm going to say it's that association that yields the pseudo-astroturfing -- lots of developers who threw their hat into the Microsoft stack, and now that they have something that is open source-y and cross platform, they advocate it for legitimacy. It's an option, sure, but the over the top gushing for another Electron-based editor is surreal.
I use Intellij for java and vim for most other languages. I started using VS Code more often recently because it is really easy to set up ide like tooling for smaller languages in it. Vim usually involves manually configuring plugins and possibly setting up environment variables.
Emacs probably also could fill this niche but whenever I try I run into things like term mode that clash with evil in horrendous ways.
Seems fairly obvious to me why VS Code would be popular with web devs like myself. It has a built in JS debugger and lots of web-related stuff works out of the box (TypeScript, JSX etc). Also the fact it is built in JS means it's easy to extend in JS, so the plugin community is already very healthy. The Vim mode is pretty damn good too (first editor to tempt me away from Vim since I learnt Vim).
I don't think there's any astroturfing/fishiness at all. If anything the opposite, they've had to overcome the negative association with MS, and to some small degree Electron. They seem to have done that by 'making a good thing', that everyone who tries is somewhat impressed with.
You mention Visual Studio and IntelliJ. Two obvious downsides with those - former is only on Windows, the other is relatively expensive. I tried IntelliJ Webstorm once, seemed good but I never really got a good enough feel for it before my trial ran out, so never tried again shrug.
I have Visual Studio installed, but still use VS Code often.
They serve different purposes, and VS Code is much nicer for web style development than Visual Studio is, which feels far too heavy.
And though VS 2017 has improved this, Visual Studio is a pain to use for non proj/sln based projects.
I am primarily a VIM user, but there are many times where the GUI niceness of VS Code, combined with it's relative light weight makes it a good option.
