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The IDE that (almost) does it all
April 08, 2021

The IDE that (almost) does it all

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

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Visual Studio Code

We use VSCode as our primary IDE for front-end software development, especially for Angular, and as a general-purpose text editor for nearly anything. It's especially used in my web development department but also used to a lesser degree in other software development groups in my organization. It allows us to have a consistent dev environment that's easy for new folks to learn while still being flexible enough for us to add our own plugins.
  • It's free & open source
  • Intuitive UI
  • Time-saving keyboard shortcuts
  • Large library of plugins
  • Integrates well with a large number programming languages.
  • Lighter-weight/faster than full Visual Studio.
  • Improvements/updates are rapid.
  • The debugger isn't as powerful as full Visual Studio.
  • It doesn't understand C#/.NET as well as Visual Studio.
  • It doesn't have built-in support for running unit tests.
  • Certain plugins like ReSharper aren't available.
  • Performance
  • Flexibility/plugin availability
  • Price (free!)
  • Ease of use
  • Increased productivity
  • Happier developers
  • Cleaner/less error-prone/higher quality code
Compared against a lot of other popular IDEs, I would say that VSCode is the perfect balance between complexity, language support, etc, for web languages. It's faster than most (though not quite as fast as native ones like Notepad++ or Sublime Text), and very flexible. Even in some non-web situations, VSCode has the best experience, for example, with Rust. It does fall short for some situations/programming languages, so I will usually have a 2nd IDE in addition to VSCode depending on what I'm doing. IntelliJ or even Eclipse is better for Java, and full Visual Studio is better for .NET/C#.

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

For front-end web development, and even for some other tasks, like node.js development, or really anything that runs in Javascript/Typescript, I don't think there is any IDE better than Visual Studio Code. Between the plugins available to add support for various frameworks, and the excellent support for HTML and other web languages built into it, it's an excellent experience. Some other IDEs may be better suited if doing development in a language that VSCode doesn't support very well, or if you want a very heavy-weight IDE with extensive profiling features and tools to resolve memory leaks.