Visual Studio Code 1.1 released | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio Code 1.1 released

code.visualstudio.com

154 pointsmswift4241 comments

This looks really good but there is one thing I find irritating: This software, an IDE, comes with a privacy statement [0]:

Some excerpts:

> We collect information about how you interact with our products and services. This includes information about how you use the products and services, such as the features you use, the web pages you visit, and the search terms you enter. It includes information about the device you use with the services, including IP address, device identifiers, regional and language settings, and information about the network, operating system, browser or other software you use to connect to the services. And it also includes information about the performance of the product or service and any errors or problems you experience with them. In order to create a richer picture of your product usage, we will correlate usage data across other Microsoft services, like Visual Studio Team Services.

> We may share or disclose personal data with Microsoft-controlled subsidiaries and affiliates. We also share data with vendors or agents working on our behalf. For example, companies we've hired to provide customer service support or assist in protecting and securing our systems and services may need access to personal data in order to provide those functions.

> Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your private content when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to:

comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process from competent authorities, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;

From a cultural point of view you wouldn't necessarily expect that from a piece of software that says "Free" and "Open Source" on its landing page. [1]

[0] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/dn948229 [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

Welcome in the 21th century. It's nothing new, isn't it? Also, Microsoft is quite late on the train. What do you think Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github ... make their money with their so called free services?

I don't favor this kind of business model, it's just so common. Nobody ever seems to complain about Google's and Apple's policies but if Microsoft does similiar: Outrage!

People definitely complain about google and Apple. I personally see google (and twitter and Microsoft) as branches of the NSA. Apple isn't quite as bad but it's not good either.

But also MS deserves more outrage than the others because they have a monopoly on the desktop.

I don't think Microsoft deserves more for being more successful in the desktop game. If anything, they would deserve more because they have a larger social responsibility because of their success. How do you take many of these companies recent publicity surrounding wanting to better protect users (see: Apple vs. FBI or Microsoft building their own data centers to protect against NSA compromised data centers). Do you feel this is for show?

Tabs please, I love it but no tabs are killing me. It is nice to see it is getting attention and we will hopefully see it in 1.2.

It kind of has tabs with the previously opened files area, they function basically the same as tabs. Just visualized differently.

No, they don't behave like tabs at all. Also, I suspect most people who demand tabs are like me and have hot keys such as ALT-1 ALT-2 ALT-3 to go direct to tab 1,2,3 respectively. The VSCode workspace does no such thing.

> No, they don't behave like tabs at all.

How so? I use them as a tab equivalent. If it's open there, I consider it an "active file" and switch between them as if they were tabs. I can close them and then reopen them at a later time, like tabs. They keep track of what files I'm working on, like tabs. The only real thing I'm not seeing is the keyboard shortcuts, sure, but you consider that an "also" so I'm wondering what else you're missing from it.

1. The next file you open always ends up at the end of the working files list in VS code. Most tab implementations don't work this way, they open up a file immediately to the right of the current tab. Therefore, if I have tabs A,B,C where B is selected and I open up D, the tabs become A,B,D,C. This is an important behavior to remember when you heavily use hot-keys to move direct to already open tabs and your brain is hardwired to expect this behavior.

2. When I close a tab, I want it gone. I don't want it still hanging around in my working space. I'm ok with it sitting around in a "Recent Files" location, but I am intentionally reducing my working space by closing a tab. The working files in VS Code don't work this way, the file hangs around and to the best of my knowledge I have to take my hand off the keyboard and use the mouse to remove it. Again, this is an important nuance that must be considered when you used to heavily using hot-keys to move between files.

Were VSCode to introduce hot-keys for directly jumping to files in the working files list, those two differences alone would make it nearly unusable for somebody who has over a decade of muscle memory built up working with tabs this way. It's also the same behavior I get and expect from other applications I use heavily, such as all my web browsers and my terminal emulator. VSCode is the odd man out.

It's been a few months since I tried to use VSCode regularly, so things may have improved since then and I'm sure there were other differences that I've forgotten, but this workflow works for me. I have alternatives that don't break my workflow (Atom, Sublime, etc).

I would really like to give VSCode a fair shot, but I personally cannot until the tab issue is addressed. It's too big of a change with little upside. Also, this is the only deal breaker for me. Other than this, VSCode looks and feels fantastic!

"Visual design for editor tabs

We have a visual design for how editor tabs might look in VS Code. We will start to implement the design in the next milestone."

Totally agree. This has been one of the biggest reasons I've been having trouble transitioning to VS Code.

I know it's silly, but the design pattern is near ubiquitous in other editors (and other applications) it's really hard to go back to not having them.

I think it was a strange choice to not include tabs up to this point, but I'm glad they're finally coming around. Kudos to the VS Code team for listening to feedback.

I'm usually in VS, where tabs are dominant, but I've used just about every editor under the sun and I've started to realize tabs are a pretty horrible UI. The first time I was forced to think outside the tab was with XCode (it has them but they don't behave anywhere near the same). I despised it at first but eventually started preferring the "assistant editor" window and using tabs to separate areas of concern. I've used Vim a lot too and I used to keep trying to make it do the tab per file thing until I saw what XCode was going for and started using it more like that and have been much happier with it. In VS Code I think the working files list on the left is a far easier to read and navigate that tabs could ever be and Ctrl+Tab still works as expected. I'm hoping VS adopts some window layout ideas from VS Code and some other places too.

A major change that disrupts a well honed workflow should have a significant upside to be worth the investment. As far as I'm concerned, the working files list does not provide enough of an upside to justify breaking my workflow, which sure is one big downside.

The working files list is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem for those who want it. I see no reason why it should be removed. That said, by not supporting an alternate tab-based workflow, VSCode is preventing a good chunk of devs from adopting it as their daily driver.

The debate over tabs vs. split view was a lively debate and it's still being considered:

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/293070-visual-stud...

I'm guessing it'll be in the next release; there's already a proposed design: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/224#issuecomment-...

If they bring in proper tabs (not single click working tab either) then I'll go back in heart beat. I've been jumping around between atom, vs code, and sublime a lot over the last few months because of how all the editors are changing the way tabs work.

I'll have to check again, but I remember not being able to adjust the big sidebar either. On a vertical monitor it's a huge waste of space to have such a wide bar with only 4 buttons in it. It'd be nice to have some customization for that.

I have been using VS Code for a year or so and it really is worth checking it out if you do JavaScript development. It has very nice IntelliSense, out of the box linting, and the best git integration I've seen in any IDE, period.

It also is a lot faster than Atom, Atom is fairly fast in OS X, not so much in Windows. VS Code is super snappy in any OS.

I have mostly use it for Angular and Node development, a downside is that it feels very inferior to Atom and Sublime when it comes to React development. I hope React support gets improved.

Agree Atom is slow. How would you compare with Sublime?

VSCode is roughly halfway between Atom and Sublime.

It's still Electron based, and there's no way around that.

What does "halfway" even mean in that context???

The way I read it is, if the one takes 10 seconds to start and the other takes 6 seconds to boot, halfway is some 8 seconds. Something like that. :)

This is a pretty serious changelist for a monthly release cadence. I was a big fan of Sublime Text for a while but began looking elsewhere when we went such a long time with no updates. Atom and VSC both seem to release much faster; they're already very good and I can't wait to see where they are in a year or two.

I love VSC but let's be frank, on a N2940 cpu with 4GB of RAM, there is no debate as to what editor is faster and less memory hungry, Sublime Text is.

I just started with the whole asp.net core thing though and so far the experience has been really great when working with C# and Typescript. Better than with ST. So now it's VSC for .net dev on linux and emacs for the rest.

I like software updates with meaningful additions. Is there something wrong with ST3? My only gripe these days is a good plugin for JSX support (formatting, etc), otherwise, I love the bastard.

VSC is a killer app for Javascript development. But for Python? Nope. What happened to the promise of PTVS coming to VSC? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10589451

There's still half a year left from that promise.

There was an issue raised 2 months ago: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/4625 which says they're going to begin work in a not too distant future. You can always bring it back up if you need a more updated answer.

I've used VSCode but I still prefer vim for JS.

PTVS team lead here. it's coming, promise :) we're working on untangling all the VS-ness out of PTVS so it can run in the VSC environment. overall team is small & we've been busy doing RTVS, and Jupyter notebooks. hopefully later this calendar year.

Did I just hear that Jupyter notebooks are coming to VSC?

If you read down a little bit you'll see this...

"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."

So, it doesn't look like it's going to happen until CoreCLR is stable.

It's alright with the Python extension. It has Intellisense, code folding, and the like.

Does anyone know how to open multiple folders in the same editor window? Either I'm stupid or the VSCode developers have completely overlooked this.

I'm pretty sure it's by design.

I've been loving VS Code for Angular 2 development. Does anyone know if they're planning to support syntax highlighting and intellisense for inline templates?

https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/7482

I like it so far, but the syntax highlighting in JS leaves a lot to be desired. Keys in object literals aren't colored, for instance. A feature of sublime text does which is also nice is coloring properties on objects which are functions.

It's a stupid gripe to have, but it makes it very hard to migrate, as my eyes are just used to seeing more distinction.

I know Atom is the more popular Electron based editor and it seems to have more plugins, however Code's JS debugging is really painless to set up and use.

I'm sure someone else is going to point out a good Atom plugin but VS Code's JS debugging "just works".

I've started and stopped using VS Code multiple times. Each time so far I've given up because of poor vim support - although it is improving. So I end up going back to using VS with the excellent vsvim plugin. Hopefully VS Code can get to parity soon.

The 1.0 release just recently opened up better key binding support for extensions, which is what the vim emulators need. Now that that is in place, it should be more likely to see one of the vim extensions for VSCode take off, hopefully.

Tabs in the next milestone! Finally!

I've used VS Code on a couple of projects and liked it except for the lack of tabs.

I think I could move to this as my main editor once tabs is implemented.

Any improvements in VSCode for Go?

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