VSCode for an ultra-fast, personalized developer experience
November 23, 2019
VSCode for an ultra-fast, personalized developer experience
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is used at will by our development team. Developers are allowed to use whichever IDE/code editor they would like. About 50% of our Javascript developers use VS Code, while the other 50% use WebStorm. For development in other languages like Java, they may pick a more robust IDE like Eclipse. I spend 80% of my time developing in Javascript and VS Code allows me to easily customize the workspace for my workflow, as well as quickly switch and inherit workflows from other projects.
- VS Code is really good at allowing customization and extensibility. There are a ton of extensions to use for all types of workflow enhancement. In particular, the user snippets and keybindings really help me personalize the experience for my developing style.
- VS Code works really well with Typescript. I really like the linting and IntelliSense that come with it. It makes the development process so much faster!
- I like that it has an integrated terminal. The terminal makes it easy to execute programs, tests, and make git changes. Its all right there and easily opened with a hotkey. I love that you can even run as many as you want! so one tab can be running a webpack development server, another watching your tests, and another for making git commits. All without leaving the window.
- The command palette is a nice touch. It's very easy to open with a hotkey and customizable to your own commands. Once you are familiar with all of them it makes your workflow quite fast, being able to open, run, change the configuration, etc all with simple commands.
- Sometimes it can't keep up with all of the extensions, linting, etc that you are trying to run. It's great that it is lightweight, but if you don't get your configuration right you can be asking it to do a lot. An example is if you are running ESLINT and don't tell it to ignore the node_modules, it will try to lint it. I noticed this really slows things down to the point where you need to reload the window.
- You can't open the same project in two different windows. A forward approach to git repositories is to have a 'monorepo'. This doesn't the best with VSCode since you can't open the same project in multiple windows. It constrains you to either opening subfolders individually (which messes up the runtime root) or forces you to work in the workspaces mode.
- There is no visibility into conflicting extensions. It would be great if they added visibility into what extensions are accessing which pieces of the internal API, so they could notify users of conflicts.
- It greatly impacts us to allow developers to use it free of charge. It allows them to pick the tools they are comfortable with without having a big cost associated with it.
- It allows flexibility in our teams. Since developers have their own machines, they can set it up however they want and use whatever style they like. This impacts how long it takes for onboarding new developers to projects as they don't need to constantly switch software.
- Atom and Sublime Text
I used Sublime Text in my introductory years for its syntax highlighting and some customization support. Atom quickly grew to a more powerful IDE with their ability for extensions so that was an easy change. I found that Atom didn't run as reliably as I had hoped, and had issues with slowing down or needing to be restarted. I tried VS Code to test it out and was hooked. It's faster, it's customizable on all the same levels and maybe more.
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