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Comment by smortaz | Hacker News Reader

We've been asked this by a few people, so I figured this is a good place to respond:

Will PTVS (Python Tools for Visual Studio) come to VSCode?

The answer is YES! This will be a major focus next year. Expect full intellisense, debugging, profiling, pkg mgmt, unit test, virtual env, multiple interpreter, Jupyter, etc. support.

Disc: Python/R/Jupyter team lead

https://www.visualstudio.com/features/python-vs

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A question: If I'm not mistaken, PTVS is basically a whole bunch of Visual Studio plugins, presumably not written in JavaScript. Since VS Code is a while different program made in a different language and a different UI framework, does this simply mean there will be a new bunch of py/r/jupy plugins for VS Code, accidentally made by the same team?

Or does VS Code have more VS-compatible integration options than I knew of, which you're going to use to port PTVS over?

My lay perspective is that it is apparently the other way around: It certainly appears that VS is increasingly "VS Code compatible". A lot of the extensions in the VS gallery have silently been working in more TS/JS code and even some of the "built-in" functionality relies on TS/JS code. (The Typescript compiler itself, of course, has always been self-hosted in VS. The DOM Explorer which can be used in webpage debugging and Cordova mobile remote debugging uses a bunch of Edge Dev Tools code much of which is also shared with VS Code as well. [Which is more reason the VS Code open source announcement is rather wild.])

It definitely would not surprise me if that's an intentional direction in VS and many more extensions and components will start to be built (or rewritten) for VS Code first as TS/JS and then "ported" to run in VS "proper". Of course, I certainly don't know anything of the matter for certain, this is just lay observation of trends I'm watching with interest in VS.

Visual Studio Code has a very modular architecture. The tool itself is written in Node.JS and web technologies, on top of Electron, and most extensions have a Javascript component. But most of the language and debugging functionality is built as out-of-process components, which means that they can be built in any technology. For example, our Typescript and Node tools are built with Node; our .NET tools are built in .NET and native code; and most of the functionality of our Go extension is built (by the Go community) in Go.

PTVS is written in a combination of .NET and Python - but with CoreCLR available across all platforms, a lot of that code can be reused. The way they integrate into the tools may be different, but they can share a lot of common code.

Interesting. I have been looking for a good editor, I use Sublime now, but I want somethign a bit more modern.

> The tool itself is written in Node.JS and web technologies, on top of Electron

This is worrying. I think Atom is a really cool editor, and it seems to have come a long way, has a lot of great features and an awesome UI. However, it is buggy and slow as hell. It crashes and behaves unexpectedly, causing it to crash and either lose changes, or need to be restarted.

I try it once every few months, most recently this week. Does VS Code behave the same way? I copied a 1000 line JSON object into Atom yesterday, and it basically crashed, how do you find VS performance?

Code is definitely not Atom. You should give it a try. It's free.

Ya, Electron != Atom. Grab Code and paste that giant JSON into Code and let us know how it goes.

visual studio code seems way faster, pasting the object was nearly instantaneous and it looks like it has a nice set of features. also, i feel i should add, i realize electron is independent of atom, however it was developed by a github engineer previously working on nodewebkit for the github texteditor called atom. it used to be called "Atom Shell" and is in the atom/electron repo. So I was curious if this was related to electron generally, or choices made in atom.

Electron was indeed originally called Atom Shell, and part of Atom. But it's a general purpose shell for cross-platform apps - it basically provides a native application shell hosting Chromium. And lots of apps - including many that aren't developer tools - are built on it. While VS Code uses Electron, and we contribute to it, we've made a lot of design choices differently from Atom in building the editor and rest of the product.

As a Python-lover: this is awesome. There is a need for something with good Python support in-between a full blown PyCharm and plain VIM

You may use Sublime Text with Anaconda plugin.

There are Jedi plugins for lots of editors - including Sublime & Atom: https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi

There are many others, of which Wing IDE[1] and Komodo[2] are probably the most well known. There's also a page[3] on the Python wiki listing a bunch more.

[1]: https://wingware.com/

[2]: http://komodoide.com/

[3]: https://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironmen...

Curious why PyCharm isn't an option. There is really no reason to not use it. The type completion / introspection is amazing, saving at least an _hour_ per day.

Sounds great. I hope you will take inspiration from Hydrogen (https://github.com/willwhitney/hydrogen) which has been the greatest benefit to my python coding in recent months.

Wow, I had somehow missed Hydrogen but that looks amazing. It will probably be what finally gets me to drop Sublime for Atom.

For those who want better Python highlighting in VSCode, we've just published MagicPython: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/magicstack.MagicP...

This is great news. Now all we need is a proper terminal in Windows that includes Python out of the box ;)

The terminal in windows 10 is much improved. Specifically copy and paste being less insane, and proper multi-line selection. I'm sure it is still deficient in many ways, but those were always the biggest irritations. No built-in python yet though.

The command prompt looks the same in Windows 8.1 and 10 to me. What terminal are you talking about?

He might be referring to powershell ... I never use CMD anymore.

I first started using it a few years back because it uses 'ls' instead of 'dir' for a directory list. Over time I've learned more and more about how its improved over CMD... and it has gotten even better in windows 10.

May not quite be 100% as good as terminal on OSX but it really is very good.

Funny annecdote. I was at a clojure meetup last night tapping away on my windows 10 laptop and the developer behind me said "is that Ubuntu?" I told him that it was W10 and he said "wow, I guess I might finally have to admit that windows doesn't look terrible anymore"

I felt like that was pretty high praise given the audience.

Even cmd is much improved in win 10. Text reflow, free zize windows, sane selection, etc. But nothing can make up for the lack of built-in, out-of-the-box UNIX utilities like cat, grep and the works.

My "workaround" for that is to install git-scm https://git-scm.com/ and select "yes" at the install Unix tools prompt.

I am not certain that it is perfect and you're 100% right that it's not "native" but it might help ease your pain a little.

Don't forget that text automatically reflows when you resize.

I shed a tear of joy when that finally happened.

Now if only I could have terminal-tabs powershell would be perfect.

You can have terminal tabs in PowerShell ISE, with Ctrl+T or File -> New PowerShell Tab.

Console2 and ConEmu both provide really good, feature rich wrappers for terminals, including first and foremost tabs.

PowerShell + Set-PSReadline = awesome terminal!

That's awesome PTVS is fantastic.

Sort of off-topic, but could you please fix the telemetry reporting? https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/supporting/FAQ

The current configuration setting is in the app folder which means that it gets deleted after updates.

It's kind of not nice to use opt-out instead of opt-in for this. Even if it's a product management requirement, surely it could me made so that the setting is saved across updates, making VSCode feel less like annoy-o-ware.

I hope Visual D will also come to VSCode.

This would be awesome! The one other thing I'd love to see is the docker + python support.

This is fantastic news. The main two IDE's I always use are PTVS and PyCharm... This is definitely great to see a full Python environment for VSCode.

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