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Comment by ZanyProgrammer | Hacker News Reader

I'm still holding out for Visual Studio for Mac.APP, not crummy Xamarin or a glorified text editor.

What would full Visual Studio get you that VSC does not? IMO, the main awesomesauce of VS, and its advantages over other IDEs and editors, are

1. The first-in-class debugger

2. Intellisense

3. Really good support for Windows-specific technologies like Win32 and COM

VSC has 1 and 2 either now, or on its roadmap. As for 3, why do you want to develop for Windows on a Mac? I guess I don't understand what you need that VSC isn't already giving you, or planning to.

Refactoring. Does that come with Intellisense? I've found that even 'rename this symbol' is extremely hard to find support for even in static languages.

It does, but it requires support from language services so it's language dependent (just because a language has syntax highlighting, it may not necessarily have 'rename symbol' support)

VS Code does good renames (across project) in TypeScript, at least.

VS still has a ton more features though.

Not guzzling battery life at idle would be a good start.

I don't appear to be able to put the debugger windows wherever I want in VSCode, let alone create additional ones... so I'd say that VSCode isn't really a substitute :(

Visual GUI editor (though that was a bigger deal in the past)

First-in-class C# support

Refactors

Object browser

Hit "F1" to get help on that function

Search everywhere

Templates / Code library

MSDN is very thorough (if wordy), lots of examples and documentation

* * *

I use VSCode at work a bit; it's faster than Atom but not as fast as sublime. It's a decent code editor, I guess if I was full-on JS I'd love it but it's still kinda eh

Lots of good progress though; I definitely have my eye on this one

I'm working with C# on Mac with this and it works perfectly fine. Debugger and intellisense is good enough to work with.

It will never be as advanced as VS but then again, VS will (probably) never come to Mac.

Can you share your instructions for setting it up please?

I found it very unconvincing last time I tried - I had weird errors installing .net Core, weird errors setting up tools in VS code and found no definitive instructions. I expected it to work pretty much out of the box... but no.

I installed .Net Core on a brand new Mac following the (seemingly very simple) instructions on Microsoft's web site and had errors too. Not impressed with that aspect at all.

Not sure if my fixes were correct or if everything was working correctly so I just abandoned .Net Core on the Mac.

Okey guys there has been some additions in what you need to do nowadays because of some problem regarding encryption libraries.

What you do on mac is:

    brew update
    brew install openssl
    ln -s /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/libcrypto.1.0.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/
    ln -s /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/libssl.1.0.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/

Then download the .net core installer for mac and it will work. Also make sure you download the C# extension in VS Code.

You'll be holding out for a long time, then.

Huh, are you thinking of developing Win32 API apps on OSX?

MVC websites, which you can do with Xamarin as well?

You can find it under name IntelliJ IDEA.app ;)

Was working with Angular 2 code today. WebStorm: 1.2gb memory used. VS Code: 45mb. WS gives me a few bells and whistles, but I prefer Code's lightness, and that it doesn't have a "screw you I'm indexing again" mode.

I like vscode too, but that does not mean, that they are in the same weight category. Vscode is "just" an editor, while IDEA is a full-blown IDE. The original poster wanted the full Visual Studio, not vscode.

(However, for some reason, I like the code completion in python mode in IDEA more than in vscode. It doesn't feel right, like the IDEA one does.)

In terms of WebStorm, dont forget to exclude tmp folders and other generated, transpiled content folder to exclude from indexing, otherweise it will be always busy. :)

Which by the way is the very first thing that I found as recommendation for how to configure projects for VSCode when I tried it today, and very explicitly:

See 'Using the "exclude" property' on https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/jsconfig

    > The exclude attribute tells the language service what files are and are not part of your
    > source code. This keeps performance at a high level. If IntelliSense is slow, add folders
    > to your exclude list (VS Code will prompt you to do this if it detects the slow down).

I went back to WebStorm though after checking VSCode out. I'm using "static type checking through IDE an JSDoc" instead of TypeScript or Flow, although I'm always evaluating both. This far I keep watching them, WebStorm alerts me to type mismatches based on all the JSDoc and Google Closure compiler type annotations I have for each and every variable, function and parameter. VSCode supports it a lot less well than WebStorm, which if you use TypeScript won't matter that much to you. I'll probably go with Flow at some point, WebStorm is getting support for it right now, it's in the current EAP (early access program). I think those who use TypeScript may probably be the closest to getting what I would get from WebStorm, although the latter also has very good TypeScript support. What I like about WebStorm is that they react pretty quickly to (good) bug reports, I filed about a hundred and 2/3rd of them have been solved quickly, of the remaining various type inference issues for example for destructured variables or parameters still need fixing, but that's because of my JSDoc reliance which I'm not sure many other people use.

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