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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

I love VSCode, but the plugin system is probably its weakest feature. Opening any new file type and VSCode will say "we have an extension for this file type!" and then open the sidebar with 200 extensions with random vote counts, and you have no idea which ones are good, official, supported, or even suit your needs. And the in-editor documentation pages, and plugin hosted web pages, reek of Microsoft. It needs a major change, maybe like separating plugins into official ones, full IDE extensions, and simple commands.

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I am curious what you would prefer over this?

"200 extensions with random vote counts" is what you get when there is an engaged community. Would you rather MS told you which extensions they think you should use?

I prefer something like the SpaceEmacs layer system, where yes, the modules are written by the community, but then they're curated and tuned to actually work well together.

I thought that's what the official language extensions are.

> Would you rather MS told you which extensions they think you should use?

Actually yes. Unopinionated systems leave me too much choice, and lead to a fragmented community.

One practical example are keyboard shortcuts. With VSCode I'm never too sure if I used the right ones, or if some plugin is messing with them... Where as for Jetbrains IDEs I'm certain that code formatting is Ctrl+Alt+L and I could tell other people that ask me.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but I mostly agree.

Most people don't want to fiddle with loads of plugins to fit their personal sensitivities.

Most people want simple and robust software that just works.

I'm curious what the alternative you'd suggest here is, then. The options I'm aware of mostly clump into a few options that I like even less:

Editors like emacs and vim where getting plugins installed involves just as much of a scattered forest of different options with varying levels of quality and support, only the installation process is more manual. Also Eclipse fits here.

IntelliJ or Visual Studio, which have great support for their primary languages, and plugin ecosystems that taper off very quickly (in terms of both quantity and quality) compared to vscode. Also, all your RAM are belong to us.

Single-language IDEs like PyCharm or Flash Builder.

There’s a format shortcut in VSCode. I’ve never had an extension mess with the shortcut and I install a bunch.

> "we have an extension for this file type!"

There's a setting for disabling that, arguably these sort of annoyances should be easier to eliminate though.

IMHO the plugins per-se are one of VSCode's strengths, you can find plenty of high-quality ones, and the APIs are good enough that making your own is overall a pleasant experience. What sucks is the Marketplace [1]: 1. searching is basically broken 2. the downloads count, and therefor the ranking system, is skewed towards extensions publishing lots of updates.

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/42890

I think there is a preference setting

    "extensions.ignoreRecommendations": true

which will turn off these notifications. Thank you for prompting to do so. I often prefer to find and install extensions when I get the itch, rather than have a popup ask me.

I've had entirely the opposite experience. Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime? You have to use a separate tool, Package Control, whose installation instructions are arcane:

  import urllib.request,os,hashlib; h = '6f4c264a24d933ce70df5dedcf1dcaee' + 'ebe013ee18cced0ef93d5f746d80ef60'; pf = 'Package Control.sublime-package'; ipp = sublime.installed_packages_path(); urllib.request.install_opener( urllib.request.build_opener( urllib.request.ProxyHandler()) ); by = urllib.request.urlopen( 'http://packagecontrol.io/' + pf.replace(' ', '%20')).read(); dh = hashlib.sha256(by).hexdigest(); print('Error validating download (got %s instead of %s), please try manual install' % (dh, h)) if dh != h else open(os.path.join( ipp, pf), 'wb' ).write(by)

And once it's installed interaction is limited to the textual omnimenu-thing, since Sublime's extension API is extremely limited. Package Control is awesome for what it is, but it's severely constrained by not being a first-class feature of the UI.

In VSCode, by contrast, there's a proper UI for extension installation that's part of the core product. Clicking on the extension brings up a full-viewport window with the README and quick links to the reviews and GitHub. I've had a lot of luck finding quality extensions by installing the official Microsoft extension, if one exists, or otherwise using number of downloads/reviews/GitHub activity as a rough proxy for quality.

JetBrains IDEs have a very similar extension installation experience to VSCode (i.e., good), but I've anecdotally found the available JetBrains extensions to be lower quality than their analogous VSCode extensions. For example, I _still_ can't find a good comment-wrapping plugin for JetBrains—everything I've tried has some weird deficiency, like not being able to wrap comments at a different column than the code width, or sometimes butchering surrounding code, etc.

I'll admit that the one frustration I have with VSCode is that there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation. I recently set up a new computer and spent the first few weeks rediscovering all the extensions I'd installed on my old computer.

I'm curious to know if there's an editor/IDE that you think has a far superior plugin experience than VSCode.

> I'll admit that the one frustration I have with VSCode is that there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation. I recently set up a new computer and spent the first few weeks rediscovering all the extensions I'd installed on my old computer.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...

I've used this with success, but in the end I found my settings / plugins are minimal so I don't bother with it now. I have like 4 settings and 5 plugins.

> Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime?

> You have to use a separate tool, Package Control, whose installation instructions are arcane:

It's been a long time since that command is not necessary anymore.

You just click an option in the menu and it installs “Package Control” by itself.

Here's the proof — https://i.imgur.com/edxKQ7T.png

Just a heads up - there is an extension for syncing extensions. It's aptly named Settings Sync, and uses a Github gist to share a manifest of plugins and configuration. You can find it here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...

Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime? [...] In VSCode, by contrast

It's probably not actually true but I've often felt the people working on the VSCode UI are guided by the core principle of 'it has to be less infuriating than Sublime'. They are very good at this.

> there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation

You can define workspace plugins in `.vscode/settings.json` and make extensions recommended for a project by putting them in `.vscode/extensions.json`. Hope this helps!

>I've had entirely the opposite experience. Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime? You have to use a separate tool, Package Control, whose installation instructions are arcane:

Not since the last 5 years or so, where it's built-in to ST.

This has only officially been built-in since last year with ST3 which took an age to come out of beta.

I've been using ST3 for like 5 years (in beta) and it was just as stable as the "stable" release.

There was absolutely no reason to use ST3 for the past 3 years if you already used ST/ST2.

That was already the case for ST2, which was stable for years before it officially announced it was "stable".

Stable/unstable for STx are just labels, they don't actually reflect the state of stability. Plus all the real work (new plugins, etc) happened on the "beta" ST3 side for years...

Can you give me an example? I've only done .NET, HTML/CSS/JS, Vue, and go-lang, in VSCode, never had that happen.

I only have installed Beautify, C#, Go, Git History, Vetur.

Sure. Rename a file with a .old extension, and voila: VS Code reports it has an extension for that.

As a developer it is important to get to know your tools. You can disable the extension recommendations in your configuration:

- extensions.showRecommendationsOnlyOnDemand

- extensions.ignoreRecommendations

>reek of Microsoft.

What does this even mean?

I was wondering the same, the feature he is talking about is excellent and done better than any other editor or IDE I've used, but somehow I don't think that's what he means.

I love that feature. Yes you need to use some savvy about who to trust. But I have had no problems with the plugins I have chosen, usually 5 stars means it works pretty well.

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