VSCode is the first development environment I’ve used that doesn’t make me feel like this. It’s not perfect but the base application is rock solid and the full DE experience is the more reliable than any other DE I’ve used.

P.S. I specifically said DE for those people who say VSCode isn’t an IDE. Personally I don’t see the point in differentiating.

P.P.S. Sublime is not a DE in my opinion. It’s an excellent text editor with syntax highlighting. The plugins were an afterthought and it was never intended to provide the full experience. Granted I haven’t used it in years.

[–] tiramichu@lemm.ee 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I'm sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that's a separate issue)

Its good for two main reasons IMO:

It is plugin-based
It is (therefore) language-agnostic

Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.

And then, because it's all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.

I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don't like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What's going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?

I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah it's great because even without a make plugin, you can just add your make command to the vscode actions that'll run your makefile.

Or even better, get the plugin which will auto populate targets from the makefile lol