VSCode team is killing it! Literally every month its tangibly making the product better. I still use Sublime occasionally on really large files as its performance is so good but for most things VSCode is my go-to!
Agreed, and I am becoming quite a fan of their work and their direction.
One concern I have is that they don't make it so feature rich that it becomes slow and overly complex - or at least be smart about which features to push out to extensions.
I hope they'll carefully architect it (both base product and extension system) so that heavy features can be turned off, either dynamically (when not needed), statically (in preferences), or both. If they do so, I'd be happy to have them add such features, because I could optimize the speed / (other) features tradeoff for myself and adjust it for different situations.
This isn't a consumer product, and it's not a "word processor". It's a tool for builders, so conventional wisdom about how great designers make the decisions instead of dumping them into preferences don't apply.
Great designers of tools like these figure out clever ways of helping users better customize their toolbox.
Kinda surprised that every version bump gets a lot of love on HN [1].
How does it compare in terms of memory usage w.r.t sublime ? I've a sublime project open for months that has never had any impact on system performance and it stays within 70MB RAM. Is VS Code even close ?
Kinda surprised that every version bump gets a lot of love on HN
I'm glad it does. Each version bump, I come over the HN to check out what people have to say. It's an extremely useful tool to me and is developing rapidly. I'm using it, but I don't have as much time as I'd like to study it, so I glance through the comments to see if someone mentions something I'm not aware of that I should know.
I could get more about the product specifically from a good VSCode forum, but they don't seem to have one. A Github Issues page is not a proper user forum. (Maybe they have one now--as I said, I don't keep up as well as I'd like.)
But HN will tell me things about VSCode in a larger context, so I would probably want to keep reading comments here even if VSCode had a proper user forum.
On what operating system and with how many tabs open if I might ask? With 6 tabs open (5 html files, 1 css file) and two extensions installed I get ~230 MB on Windows.
It's not, OP didn't count the other processes in (they are listed seperatly in Activity Monitor). VSCode needs roughly the same amount of RAM on macOS.
I'm pretty impressed as well. I'm using as a IDE/debugger for Python code and running under Linux, and works very well. The debugger is not as solid as PyCharm, but the editor is certainly better.
It became my second go-to editor, right after Sublime. Kudos to Microsoft for releasing as a free tool, and multi-platform.
I just started playing with it earlier today. I'm a long-time Visual Studio user and VSCode is good. I'll have to give it more time, but so far, I can see myself using it for stuff outside the office (work is .Net, so I'll be sticking with VS).
Copy Syntax Highlight is huge. Years ago, I had written a utility to invoke syntax highlighting from text sources for use in PowerPoint presentations and Photoshop editing (https://github.com/minimaxir/copy-syntax-highlight-osx/ ); I am very happy it is now obsolete.
Tested with VS Code 1.10 and hit a snag. On macOS, copying w/ syntax highlight from VS Code -> Mail works, but copying from VS Code -> Keynote or VS Code -> Pixelmator does not.
However. VS Code -> Mail -> Keynote and VS Code -> Mail -> Pixelmator both work. Rich text is funny.
I think VS Code is pretty awesome. But I stopped using it because the monthly update experience on Ubuntu Linux pretty much sucks...by which I mean it mirrors the Windows update experience. One day I sit down to work and it's time to update and I lose fifteen or twenty minutes plus flow state going through the process (o.k. Windows with multiple reboots is actually noticeably worse often times (like just earlier this week)).
I get that there might not be business value in maintaining a PPA. And upgrading Emacs to the latest version required compiling from source (chosen over trusting something unofficial) and that was a more of a pain in the ass than updating VS Code tends to be by a factor of six. But I only need to suffer that pain occasionally and Emacs does not nag me every time open it up and make me feel like I should upgrade.
Again, I like VS Code, but I don't like being a second class citizen for using Linux. [1] I just want to go to my editor session and edit whether it's the last day of the month or the first.
[1]: I'm not anti Windows - but for Vista, I've used every desktop version for making money since Windows 3.1 (and DOS's before that) and owned each of them but for NT 4.0 and Vista. Even ME and XP Professional x64.
Hi brudgers, I'm on the VS Code team and I look after most of the Linux related stuff. I feel your pain as I've been updating my Insiders build nearly every day for the past 12 months. When you install this version, an apt repo and signing key will automatically be registered in your system which will enable auto-updates from here on. You can also install the repo manually if you want[1].
I've created an issue to follow up what to do with the update notification now that the repo exists[2].
I hate to ask a question on a platform such as this, but do you have any idea of whether column select will be supported properly? Right now it exists but is implemented slightly differently to most other editors including visual studio itself, and the default binding (shift+alt) cannot to my knowledge be remapped to the much easier 'just alt'
The old way, it gets downloaded, then run `sudo dpkg -i FILE.deb`. With the new PPA, just run `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade`. Maybe I just like the terminal but upgrading VS.code is simpler than installing other unix utils.
I ran VS Code for over a year on Ubuntu. Granted downloading and installing a deb is not as smooth as the OSX click to upgrade, however I've very curious as to what caused 15-20 minute upgrade times for you.
What is the long term value to Microsoft for VS Code? It is definitely improving their image within the web development community, and I imagine it is also winning them favor with Go developers.
Have people noticed a network effect after using VS Code? Are you getting sucked into the rest of the MS ecosystem at all?
I used vs code to play around with typescript, which led me to check out the bot framework. I then built a prototype bot for work, showed it to my boss, and got the time to turn it into a product whose primary interface is skype. That product uses the luis natural language service, which we now pay for on azure. So, at least for me there was a strong network effect.
An enterprise room assistant that can help people book meeting rooms, navigate to them and give more information about a room, including comfort derived from sensor data. We're in a soft-launch to our existing customers right now so I can't point to a website.
Their long-term plan seems to be that Azure is going to be the best / easiest platform to host the projects they contribute to on. Therefore, their open source projects like TypeScript and .NET Core act as a funnel to drive people to Azure.
I also think that they are trying to position .NET Core as a viable competitor to Java, for which they need decent cross-platform tooling.
I have to admit, since I switched from Atom to VSCode, I'm also re-evaluating other Microsoft products. I even bought a copy of Win10 (but it wasn't as good as I hoped, haha).
Also, I worked with a few DevOps people who really hated AWS usability and some of them said Azure should be much better.
Azure goes through ups and downs. It can be really good, and also really shitty.
The transition of Classic to ARM (Azure Resource Manager) made me drop Azure for AWS. Now ARM is more or less stable so there's no issues, but damn when they started it was complicated.
Visual studio code is also the best option for writing Rust on any platform these days (imo!).
Haven't noticed myself buying more microsoft products, but have noticed how much more interested I am in what microsoft is releasing these days (.NET core for example)
One option: To have full control of the user experience when people are working with Microsoft tools and technologies.
And maybe to push the whole editor market to a direction they like. A bit like what Google did with Chrome. Think about for example Typescript language service. Now they have been able to push the idea and demonstrate how useful it is. Probably this generates demand from users for other editors to add same feature.
What is the long term value to Microsoft for VS Code?
A strategic tool for a strategic group (to MS's future): developers. It's not a very big team, so even a total failure would be capped at a fairly small downside, but the upside of capturing significant loyalty is not capped. "Loyalty" here is to VSCode, not to Microsoft, but if MS controls a tool that large numbers of developers are committed to, it can make sure that a large number of developers have an easy, reliable way to use technologies MS wants to push.
I'm not saying that MS would capture developers and then force them to use MS technologies. That would kill the goose laying the golden eggs. They can just build their own extensions that work extremely well and make any necessary changes to the base product and extension system to support the extensions so that developers have an easy and reliable way to adopt new MS technologies on all platforms, not just Windows.
This might not end up being of great practical value to them or it could turn out to be huge at some point in the future. Limited downside, unlimited potential upside. It's a speculative bet, but apparently they think it's worth trying.
All I noticed is since I started using VSCode is how much the developers communicate with the users. I filed a few bug reports and both got addressed rather quickly.
I don't think this has happened before to me that I "complained" about something and it got actually fixed!
The earnings on developer tools have never been huge but the revenue on Windows server has been huge.
The market is shifting from buying windows server to azure. By having an editor that works seamlessly with Microsoft's azure options it cements Microsoft as a long term player in the hosting market.
Microsoft also spends a lot of resources on documentation which makes it an easy choice for the frustrated developer who can't get something working on another companies offering.
Long-long-term it is probably going to supersede regular Visual Studio, which isn't (and without gargantuan effort probably never really can be[1]) cross-platform.
[1]: more effort than bringing VSCode up to feature parity
Can someone explain the attraction of the minimap? It's something I turn off in any editor.
I can't rely on a postage stamp size picture of my code being unique enough between different parts of a file -- beyond perhaps the imports/constants/macros at the top, which you don't need help finding anyways.
I worked at a company that had some files that were thousands of lines long. The result of 10 years of entropy build up.
When you've worked with these files long enough, and it sounds kind of funny, but the shape of the code becomes very familiar. Searching for keywords though usually my primary method of finding places in code was sometimes less effective because it would occur multiple times (think function names) however I was intimately familiar with the shape of the code, so I could just jump to the 2 indented part.
A tree view of whatever you are working on would be more efficient to jump through parts of code, like Vim TagBar for instance. VSCore has Alt+O for symbols but I wish it had a tree view on the side of the editor.
It's everything a scroll bar does and more. Yea you can kind of get to know the structure of your code which is nice and sometimes when I open up a file and the mini-map is dense I already know I'm getting into a big file.
One of the most useful features for me (not sure if VS Code has this), but when I double-click/select a word, all other words with the same name are highlighted in the minimap. It's crazy useful for me, like a double-click/search/find all instances, it helps me jump around code very quickly.
Playing around with the minimap now, and disappointingly it doesn't seem to render the text selection (at least not at my dpi). Was looking forward to that as well.
If you haven't tried vscode however, it's always had selection markers inside the real scrollbar.
Hi eduren, I'm on the VS Code team. The minimap this release is just a preview focused on getting the performance aspects of it right. You can read about what's to come at the bottom of the minimap section https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_10#_preview-minimap
Tyriar, thanks SO much for minimap! I use multiple editors. I mark up some of my files with designs that can be seen from a "high altitude" minimap view, and I've had to use a different editor for those files until now. With minimap, I can also edit those files with VSCode and eliminate one other editor.
I hope you'll add a variety of preferences for it, so users can decide for themselves how much "weight" they want to bear and for which features. I'd like to be able to toggle it on/off, have it show highlights, keep the viewport highlighted even when the mouse is not in the minimap, and adjust the width (sometimes I have more room, sometimes I have a VERY long file, etc.).
SEPARATE ISSUE: I wish the "Panel" (output, terminal, etc.) could be positioned side-by-side with the code instead of being fixed on the bottom, where it covers up half of your code while leaving the right side of the screen empty.
I tried using minimap in other editors and it just got in my way. Tick marks have always been far more useful to me. At a glance I see if there are other occurrences of a term in the entire file. With minimap, I have to scroll to find what I want.
Now if we can just get Sublime-like Project folders that read settings from custom JSON (currently VSCode's #1 most requested issue on Github) I don't think there's any huge features I'll miss
Although vscode is a very impressive project, I get the impression it would prove frustrating for my use case: particularly, I am in the habit of using and hacking on my editor when I do not have net connectivity, and what this update and the last 2 updates have done is display a prominent banner in a contrasting background color saying "Error: the internet connection appears to be offline" that won't go away until I manually dismiss it. Then the banner reappears a few minutes later according to some criteria I have been unable to guess, and there is no "don't show again" button like there is on some other banners vscode shows me.
Also I discovered no way to obtain a usable local copy vscode's documentation without acquiring deep knowledge of the system. (The deep knowledge becomes necessary after I clone the repo at github.com/Microsoft/vscode-docs.)
In summary, I'm going to encounter many frustrations if I make a deep dive into vscode the way it exists today, and I should wait till someone adapts it for offline use; is that not true?
I've been using VSCode for golang recently and it's been amazing. It just feels faster and more responsive than Atom. I love how it suggested golang plugins as soon as I started editing a go source file- and they just work!
I'm hoping they add in support for multiple project folders soon [1]. It makes it a bit difficult to work with microservices since I need a few projects open at a time.
Can you quickly compare Atom and VSC for golang development? I've been using Atom with go-plus, and I'm quite happy with the setup. I'm wondering if there's anything I'm missing.
Only reason I am still using Atom is flow support that comes with Nuclide. I know VS code has a couple flow plugins as well.. Can anyone compare Atom's flow support with VScode?
I wish I could comment as to nuclide or similar. tbh, for me it's a really glorified editor, but I find the integrated terminal windows invaluable... I usually do all my git/npm/run commands in the terminal.
I also find the everything via command palette a little distracting, as I wouldn't mind seeing better UI integration for some extensions.
Today I was looking into using the VS Code debugger for embedded C and I was surprised that the c/c++ extension is not open source. Does anyone know the reason?
I can't figure out how to enable TypeScript auto import - is it hidden behind a flag? Coming from IDEs, I've been waiting for this feature for a long time.
I work on TS and JS support for VSCode. Try moving the cursor into red squiggles for the missing symbol and then clicking on the lightbulb in the gutter or hitting cmd+period. This will bring up the quick fix menu for adding missing imports.
We don't support automatically adding imports as you type, but this is something we are looking into.
No lightbulb, but cmd+. did it -- Thanks! Any way to format the import too (we use single quotes and no semicolon, enforced by TSLint)?
Awesome job on JS/TS integration by the way. I've used Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Notepad++, Sublime, Atom, Vi, Webstorm, and Intellij in the past, and editing TS in VSCode beats all those other editors by a mile. Keep it up!!
The extension is very low quality. TS2.2 shipped support for auto-importing missing dependencies, and VSCode mentions in this release that they support it. My hope is that this blessed implementation is better than the Auto Import extension.
Did I miss auto imports feature announcement? I saw that typescript got this support and it was pending a VS code release, I figured this would be the release
Could someone do an in-depth comparison of VSC and Atom for PHP development projects? I'd love to switch but am afraid that VSC is missing something, like the precious PHP-integrator stuff. Does it have reasonable support for Xdebug?
We support live preview for markdown and are investigating support for html as well ( https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/12080 ). Extensions can also provide their own live preview implementations
fantastic support! looking forward to it. VS Code is the new de facto IDE.
One killer feature might be something from LightTable, where you can highlight a chunk of code and see the output printed on the same page without leaving it.
That's probably one of the last features that makes LightTable valuable but VS Code is killing it! I ditched Atom and SublimeText as well.
Visual Studio for Mac (currently available as a preview) is a full IDE, meant to be more like the .NET development experience in Visual Studio for Windows.
Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform programmer's text editor, similar to Sublime or Atom. If you are into .NET, it has a good server-side development experience, but for client-side you'll want to stick with the full Visual Studio IDEs.
Code is very extensible, though, and has support for a ton of platforms that you might not normally see supported in the full IDE. You might prefer it for JavaScript, Go, Rust, etc.
When you say for clientside you would want to stick to the full Visual Studio IDE, do you mean web clientside or clientside as in traditional desktop apps?
If you did mean web clientside could you expand on that?
Hmmmm... I'm pretty sure this is Visual Studio Mac though I've never heard it called that before. You can edit and debug C# as well as many other languages with Visual Studio Code on your Mac.
Visual Studio Code is an oxymoron -- there isn't anything visual about it. "Visual" in Visual Studio use to mean UI widgets you can drop onto a form or some layout grid.
I think they went to the "visual" moniker when IDEs started to become GUI (Windows vs DOS) based. It's been years, but I remember having to position controls using coordinates in code when tinkering with Visual C++. It certainly didn't have drag and drop like Visual Basic did at the time.
