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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

I personally moved to visual studio code (from WebStorm ) which has a good debugger for Nodejs and a few features that are really handy ( support for .d.ts definitions for node modules ... ). I usually don't use MS products but they did an impressive job with that IDE, no question.

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VS Code has become the editor I find myself using most often because it usually does things that I do with a little more elegance and ease than other editors. One thing I see people complain about, as I used to, is that it doesn't have a file tab interface and it only puts files you have changed in the "working files" area, meaning if you open a file to view it you can lose track of it. However, I discovered clicking on the file name of the open file reveals a drop down of most recent files. After using it for awhile, I no longer miss having multiple files open in tabs.

You should consider using keyboard navigate files CTRL+P - shows list of recently opened files and it's a fuzzy search dialog - no mouse involved.

My gripe with VisualStudio code file tree is that it doesn't have icons - this is actually pretty huge for me - I use the file tree when I'm reorganizing code structure and need a good overview of things - for all it's failings as a text editor Atom file tree is really nice with the icons addon - hopefully something like that shows up for VSCode.

That and YouCompleteMe for C++ and I'd switch all the way to VSCode, and I have no doubt that is going to happen so I'm just waiting now (too little time to work on it ATM otherwise I would start it)

The closest analogue to tabs is their split pane view.

I don't fully understand the rationale behind shying away from tabs, but reducing cognitive load/context switching and reducing CPU/RAM strain seems to be the desired effect.

Came here to say this but you beat me to it. VS Code is great. It's come a long way very quickly and now that it has extension / add-on support, it's top tier.

Don't forget integrated git support too! And yeah the type definition files are awesome since you get intellisense with documentation in it! I wonder if the author of the article has given Code a good look because it would seem to meet most of his needs.

My only pain point with VS Code right now is the lack of any kind of core REPL support. I'd love to be able to sling stuff back and forth between source code and a REPL like you can in emacs. And yeah I know about Command-C - I just want to do everything in the IDE.

Author here, I haven't tried Visual Studio Code but i'll be sure to check it out.

As a side note, WebStorm also supports TypeScript definitions. It has an menu to download and add them to your project from definitely typed under "Preferences->Languages & Frameworks->JavaScript>Libraries"

I also switched to VS Code after using WebStorm forever. Try it out.

VS Code has great TypeScript support (since both of those are Microsoft products)

I find the UX approach a little weird in VS Code. I like tabs. I've had tabs in my editors/ IDE's since I started out.

To make me switch to this 'working files' area really puts me off their product.

WebStorm has support for .d.ts definitions for some time now.

See JavaScript > Libraries > Download... and make sure to choose TypeScript community stubs. You can also add your own manually.

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