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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone who uses Visual Studio Code compare its functionality to the native Visual Studio? I forgot about this project because it's seldom mentioned:

https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

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I use VSCode daily and I love it.

I've always been a fan of lightweight text editors and always choose speed over piles of functionality. To me Visual Studio feels like trying to run while wearing cement shoes. It takes forever to load and crashes/freezes far too often for my taste.

VSCode is amazingly light weight and stable and brings in IntelliSense, basic refactoring tools, and pretty solid git integration.

If you're used to using a full-featured IDE like Visual Studio (etc) you'll probably find VSCode lacking (but blazingly fast). If you're used to using sublime, atom, etc... You'll find VSCode to be feature rich and comparably fast.

(I work at Microsoft, but not on VSCode or Visual Studio. These opinions are my own and don't represent Microsoft)

I feel like these editors that pull in entire browser runtime and run JavaScript aren't really light weight or stable.

It takes about 3 seconds for Visual Studio to open on my desktop; not exactly forever.

Loading Visual Studio is (decently) fast. Loading a solution with 1000s of files takes FOREVER compared to VSCode which loads basically instantly because it's folder based.

Yeah. VSCode has infinitely more functionality on my macbook than VS does. :D

But seriously, if you're running Windows and have a VS license, use VS. Otherwise use VSCode.

VSCode is the best IDE for TypeScript. Some will point at atom, they are wrong.

Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is zero cost and doesn't appear to have any obvious weaknesses (apart from being Windows only):

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/compare-visual-s...

VS Community Edition has licensing restrictions if you're using it at work:

An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.

For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-communit...

It's a completely separate project. I'm not sure there's a useful comparison between the two.

How is it as an editor? There are already lots of popular choices: vim, Emacs, Sublime, Atom, etc. How are the plugins? Code completion, multiple cursors, AceJump, etc?

Jesus, just try it dude! No one can confirm your personal preferences for you. It's literally the easiest application in the world to try out, doesn't even require installation.

Code completion is not as good. I believe VSC uses gocode. VS 2015 also has a cool new feature that shows you references to each function right above the function declaration. Clicking on the reference count will open a quick jump contextual menu.

I wouldn't compare the two products. VS has a SQL editor. It manages database connections. There is an integrated merge tool that is actually quite good. You have project templates, which I haven't found with VSC (I haven't really looked).

That cool new feature was actually present in VS2013. VS2015 has even cooler stuff but for sure the reference count existed in VS2013.

Thanks for the correction. Can you tell which version I skipped? ;P

> VS 2015 also has a cool new feature that shows you references to each function right above the function declaration. Clicking on the reference count will open a quick jump contextual menu.

This feature is actually also available in VS Code[0], though only for C# currently. We should be able to add support for this in Go as well[1].

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/editingevolved#_re...

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-go/pull/75

Very nice feature. While you're in there tinkering under the hood, how about wiring it up for JavaScript & Python, too? (I'm mostly kidding, because this appears to be exactly the direction you're already heading.)

But PLEASE enable basic drag and drop text editing as soon as you can. Since the 1980s, EVERY text component, text editor, IDE, and word processor Microsoft has ever made has had the basic editing ability to drag a selected bit of text and drop it into a new location, with the maddening exception of VS Code where, when you try to drag your selection, you just lose the selection.

There are multiple requests for this in the feature request section of the VSC website, but unfortunately everybody calls it by a different name, so a single, higher-priority issue that would be suggested to most voters as they look over the top of the list is instead recorded as a bunch of low-priority issues lost down in the weeds, discovered by so few that it keeps getting recreated as a new issue.

That would be amazing. It's a great way to study an unfamiliar code base. It's a great feature on its own as well.

VS Code is a programmers text editor. It has great support for a lot of the things Atom does well for example. It isn't an IDE in the same way you most likely think of Visual Studio. It is free though so why not give it a try?

It depends a lot on what language you're writing. VS has a lot more features, but they tend to be for more established languages (namely C++/C#).

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