I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
Idk where you got the “just works” idea from, but maybe you’re looking for something more like the jetbrains IDEs?
I still use the terminal all the time with VSC.
Yeah, I guess the idea of VSCode isn’t to be a “ready to use” IDE, but to be configurable — which it is.
The main thing that makes it popular nowadays is the ecosystem of plugins around it. Ex: when Copilot was released, I believe the VSCode plugin was the best one.
Also many frameworks docs have instructions on how to use it with VSCode and which plugins to install, such as some web frameworks and Flutter.
On top of being super bloated, Intellij’s Rider is far from “just working” in my experience. Not only is it super slow to boot, but it also changes asmdefs in my Unity project unprompted, in a way that prevents my project from working (creates cyclic dependencies). The debugger also sometimes doesn’t trigger breakpoints 😵💫
I absolutely despise it, viscerally.
I don’t think VSCode’s mantra is that it “just works”. It’s definitely a “platform” IDE like Eclipse was.
What do you mean fix it? I haven’t had an issue with vscode or extensions unless I was going against established patterns.
For an actual recommendation, if you were fine with tmux and vim rock em yo. Don’t forget vim has panes as well.
Platformio maybe?
That thing just sometimes won’t work on some PCBs unless you explicitly specify a build option (I had it once that I had to specify a build option that was already specified in that board configuration)
Installing pycom stuff too. All of their software is crap (hardware isn’t amazing either) so their released version simply didn’t work by default on a fresh installation and the fix was to roll back to the previous version manually.
The problems you’re facing aren’t very clear. Can you expand a bit?
Lots of things in VS Code just work if you use the non-FOSS version and don’t need to install any system dependencies. For example, there are a ton of code formatters that you can install and run without tuning (eg I installed a SQL formatted last week with nothing else to do). There are also some that you need underlying dependencies for (eg if you want Rust extensions to work, you need the Rust toolchain; same for LaTeX); however this is true in any editor based on my experience (although some editors eg JetBrains might mask that through their GUI). Across both options, you often need to tune your extensions based on your use case or even hardware in some cases (eg setting up nonstandard PATH items).
YMMV for VSCodium, the FOSS version, primarily because it relies on a different extension registry per the terms of use. You can get around this as a user; as a vendor they cannot. Outside of tweaking the registry I’m not aware of anything else you need to do for parity.
Edit: forgot to tie all this back to my opener. What do you mean when you say it requires all sorts of work? Are you experiencing other issues than something I called out?
VSCode seems to have fun ignoring my “don’t guess encodings and assume this one” on files.
VSCodium respects that setting.
I was doing some Jinja templating in a Flask app the other day and VS Code would not respect my explicit file typing through the GUI over restarts. I had to change my file extensions and install an extension for Jinja syntax highlighting to get that to work.
I feel that pain.
I do. I used to juggle between Code::Blocks, PyDev, NetBeans and others, depending on projects. I find VS Code kind of fulfills the promise of Eclipse of being an all-purpose IDE, without the bloat Eclipse became synonymous with. It really clicked for me when I started using devcontainers. I am now a big fan of the whole development containers concept and use it in VS Code daily…
Code::Blocks
This still exists? I played around with it’s portable app eons ago.
development containers
How does that compare to Vagrant?
Code::Blocks is still chugging along, albeit at a glacial pace.
The rise of Docker has made containers very popular in the last 10 years or so. Nowadays you can run a single WSL2 VM on Windows with a Linux distro, and run any number of containers inside it. Vagrant is useful if you need full-fledged VMs for your environments.
