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Visual Studio Code - the best, free IDE for JavaScript projects
Updated September 17, 2021

Visual Studio Code - the best, free IDE for JavaScript projects

Tim Hardy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Visual Studio Code

We used Microsoft Visual Studio Code to handle many of our JavaScript projects. Visual Studio Code is much more suited to Single Page Application (SPA) projects, NodeJs projects, and any client-focused projects than Visual Studio. Visual Studio is not a good fit for any project that needs to respond to many files changing on the file system, which SPA projects typically do. Visual Studio Code fills this gap by allowing the file system to be the source of truth, instead of fighting changes to the file system, like Visual Studio will do.
  • Manages SPA applications well by responding to changes on the file system, such as those made by "ng serve".
  • Manages any npm-based application by responding to changes made by "npm install".
  • Highly pluggable architecture allows the Developer to configure their environment however they like.
  • I would like there to be a more "out of the box" default configurations for Angular projects. By default, Visual Studio Code does not honor tslint suggestions in Angular projects, and it creates friction between devs who are set up to honor Angular's tslint guidelines and newer developers who are not. Just a single choice to "configure for Angular" would be great.
  • I would also like to be able to use the Visual Studio Code as a "git merge tool" to handle merge conflicts. You currently can't do that in VS Code.
  • I'd like to be able to pin tabs like I can in Visual Studio, so I can keep certain files always open.
  • We saw an immediate productivity boost moving to VS Code from VS working on our Single Page Applications, especially our Angular apps.
  • VS Code also gave us a much better environment from some of the simpler editors we tried, like Notepad++. The plug-in architecture provides a lot of power that we took advantage of.
  • VS Code has some very nice integrations with Azure if you use the Azure ecosystem.
We had better luck with VS Code than Atom. We tried to like Atom pretty hard, but it just had some clunkiness and some unintuitive things that caused us to give up on it. Webstorm seems to be a much more capable competitor. The main pro of VS Code over Webstorm is that VS Code is free and Webstorm costs money. I will give a review of Webstorm later.
There seems to be a good number of resources and large enough community around VS Code that I can usually get an answer to my questions in a timely manner. It's not stellar enough from Microsoft itself, but the community steps in to fill in the gaps enough to take care of each other.

Do you think Microsoft Visual Studio Code delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Visual Studio Code's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Visual Studio Code live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Visual Studio Code go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Visual Studio Code again?

Yes

Visual Studio Code is perfect for any JavaScript-focused project, especially those which have a lot of file changes occurring from outside the IDE. Any sort of linting process or auto-building process, like "ng serve", gulp, grunt, etc will be well-served and managed via Visual Studio Code. We use it for any scenario where Visual Studio becomes a pain in the butt. Conversely, .NET projects are better served with Visual Studio.