All Your Code Editing Needs in One Package
December 20, 2018
All Your Code Editing Needs in One Package
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Visual Studio Code
We use Visual Studio Code throughout the engineering team at our company. Our engineers are given the choice to use whatever code editor they prefer but Visual Studio Code is the overwhelmingly popular choice. It is not difficult to see why they prefer it over its alternatives. Outside of being as easy to use as any quality text editor, it features powerful keyboard shortcuts that can greatly speed your productivity. VS Code has gone out of its way to be kind to developers transitioning from other editors such as Vim or Sublime, and allows you to install keyboard shortcuts from these popular tools. It comes with everything a great text editor requires on its own, but builds on that with excellent support for a wide range of plug-ins that add fantastic features like Git integration, spell checking, autocompletion, package management, task management, support for specific languages and frameworks, linters, code snippets, and much, much more. For example, my own workflow includes Git and Angular, and so I have a number of Angular support plug-ins to make my component development must faster, and GitLens to help me see, inline, whom made changes to the code and when.
- Increases productivity of your software engineers through a set of well-considered and flexible keyboard and navigation shortcuts, along with code writing assistance such as snippets and code completion.
- An excellent community of plug-in developers provides a plug-in solution to whatever features you might need or want.
- Integrates with your versioning and collaboration tools such as Git.
- Constantly improved and open-source.
- Searching for keywords across larger projects could be optimized for improved time to results.
- A bit slim in features out of the box.
- The built-in terminal is somewhat limited and a bit cumbersome.
- Great improvements in software development productivity.
- Improved bug tracking and management through plug-in and extensions offered by the support community.
- Easier collaboration among engineering team members and versioning control.
- Sublime Text
- Atom
- GNU Emacs
- Notepad++
Visual Studio Code is light-years ahead of GNU Emacs and Notepad++ in terms of its extensibility and integration with collaboration and versioning tools such as Git. The competition heats up considerably when you compare it against Sublime Text and Atom, both of which feature many of the same benefits and features, including extensibility through plug-ins and extensions. However, Sublime Text requires a license fee to use it legally, and Atom has lagged behind in terms of performance. When it came time to select a code editor for my role for personal and professional development I leaned toward VS Code for its performance, features and cost (free is always a great cost in my book).