Never Been a Huge Fan of IDEs, but I Like Visual Studio Code

To be completely honest, for the past many years, I’ve debated whether or not to use an IDE. On one had, they provide a number of features like code completion, debugging, and a number of other things that I find incredibly useful. On the other hand, I’ve found that I’m more productive when I’m using a terminal or a lightweight windowed text editor such as gedit.

Sublime edit was pretty decent for it’s use of system resources, but I kept finding myself less than interested in learning all it’s features. Leading up to the time I discovered sublime edit, It seemed every few months, there was a new IDE to experiement with, and I’d simply gotten burned out. People said all kinds of great things about eJetBrains products, but they wanted me to pay for them and made it fairly difficult to even sample the product.

Finally, I discovered Visual Studio Code, and I find myself using it more and more. It probably helps that I haven’t been asked to pay money at any time. Not that I ever felt like I was missing out on any features of Sublime Text, Komodo Edit, Asana, or any of the other dozen or so IDEs I’ve used over the years by not purchasing a license, but It’s kind of nice not having that little dialoge pop up every so often when saving a file reminding me that I should pay for a license. Guess what… no… Ask my employer, when I have one.

I never really saw much reason to get excited about an IDE. What, it can complete a function name here and there? Show me the the parameter list of a function that I could look up on, and most likely already have looked up on google. Ok, I have found some utility in tracing function calls, but again, the need for that is relatively rare. Typically I have a pretty good idea of the structure of a project that I’m working on. I feel like if I find myslef clicking around a project like that, I’ve got some more questions to ask people and documentation to read before I expect to be able to do anything useful.

Now Visual Studio, on the other hand, has a code completion feature that I find incredibly useful. It will actually anticipate what I’m about to write. In many cases, I can just type the function name, a line or two, and I’ll find that it has, in tab completion, ready for me to use, the next few lines of code. This is an incredible feature, it cuts down on a lot of wasted time. Pretty much every repetitive thing I’ve ever needed to type, using VSCode, I’ll never need to type again. It’s incredible the accuracy with which it is able to infer what I am about to write. I’m astonished.

And with that, from a developer who has found themselves coding nearly exclusively in the terminal for the past decade, I’m going to actually reccommend VSCode to anyone looking for a new text editor. It’s great. I actually enjoy using it. It’s configuration is stored primarily in files written is JSON, which you can save and copy to a new environment, and it can be extended using Typescript (for which I’ll describe an example in this post).