Hacker News Reader

Comment by hilyen | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free. Unlike a lot of the listed editors.

VSC isn't a well-behaving Mac-app.

As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20440258, coherent UI is a very important point to users since they can assume that some feature from App X will also work on App Y.

This is very prevalent in the macOS Cocoa ecosystem unlike Windows(every app reinvents notifications) or Linux(GTK/Qt/... fragmentation).

Hence the importance of Cocoa in macOS apps. (and VSC is electron :-()

Exactly.

I tried it for a few weeks and couldn’t stand it. There’s just too much non-Mac UI for a tool that honestly isn’t that powerful. For example, the search and replace is truly awful. I use BBEdit because it’s both consistent and powerful (better search and replace than vim).

This is coming from a guy who used a highly customized vim set up as his primary editor for years.

Why did you stop using vim?

The number one reason is that BBEdit’s search and replace is better.

I can select text, make it the search pattern, then modify the text and make it the replace pattern. Then I can do a full or partial search and replace without ever opening the Find window.

If I want, I can open the Find window and edit either string. The search string will already be properly escaped as a regular expression.

vim’s search and replace is just a lot less convenient.

Beyond that, BBEdit is a Mac app through and through, so it feels very natural to use.

And yet a sizable number of Mac users choose to use it.

> And yet a sizable number of Mac users choose to use it.

Yes, but that doesn't change that VSCode isn't a well-behaving Mac App. Yeah, VSCode is a pretty great app, but it's not because of it's UI.

A sizable number of Mac users are not really Mac users, they happen to use a Mac at work or for some other reason, and usually end using the likes of Chrome, GIMP, Gmail, Google Docs, and all manner of Electron apps.

A sizeable amt of Mac users who use VSCode are also not like what you’re talking about. An easy way to see this is by going through GitHub repos relating to Mac geekiness and seeing VSCode represented quite a bit. How many general code editors are alive today that are truly “Mac” apps? Sublime sure isn’t to me. Coda is pretty specific to web dev. BBEdit and Textmate 2. The latter of which is sometimes mocked and barely used.

TextMate is mocked? Why?

It didn’t get updated for a very long time. Textmate 2 was in production for a long time. When it came out many had switched from Textmate already. And Textmate 2 missed many features that newer editors have while also not having much of an ecosystem any more.

So a common mocking is something like Textmate? Yeah I used that a decade ago, etc.

I've been using Macs since the early 90s, and VSC is fine for me. All the skeuomorphic stuff Apple has put out pretty much shits all over any widget purity arguments IMO. Most users don't care, they just don't want it to look ugly or like a bad windows port.

> Most users don't care, they just don't want it to look ugly or like a bad windows port.

I’m very surprised at that, since myself and most of my friends value very much of how the UI is Cocoa.

I’m pretty sure a majority of the macOS user base considers the macOS look-and-feel very importantly.

Well I’ll back up the grandparent comment: I don’t want it to look crap, but it being entirely native Cocoa doesn’t bother me either way. It’s nice when an app is, but as long as it’s not horrible to look at or use, I’m happy. I know a lot of my fellow developers where I work are the same way, so I don’t know how true your thesis is on the majority wanting “give me Cocoa or give me death” — but I’m arguing anecdotes with anecdotes haha

I'm a Mac user with a strong preference for the superior and consistent kind of UI that great Mac apps are known for, but I use VS Code.

It's UI polish is nowhere near the level of something like BBEdit — which I still do use for some text-related tasks, e.g. formatting weirdly encoded CSV files or something like that — but VS Code also provides real and valuable features that no native Mac programming editor does.

For me, the TypeScript integration, auto-complete, in-editor as-you-type linting, and highly functional project-wide features like "jump to definition" and "find all references" provide me with real utility that no "real" Mac app has.

To get those features, I'd have to be looking at something like Webstorm, which is a huge bloated Java behemoth, with an even more alien UI and even worse performance.

I would totally pay $100 for a nice fully-native fully-Mac editor that did everything VS Code does, but there isn't one.

But not because it’s a good Mac app, but because there’s not always a good alternative for good language integration. I’m only using it because the Go plugin is pretty good and the one from Sublime Text isn’t.

Yeah, I love using VSC on my windows machine, but I'll stick to Sublime on macOS. It does also have a lot of weirdness/non-mac behavior, but it's a lot better (and doesn't kill performance)

How does Sublime Text contribute to the open web and how is it consistent with macOS UI?

You can submit any new links on this project at GitHub [1].

[1] https://github.com/good/openweb

I'm surprised that neither VSC nor Atom make it. Unless there's a strong language level alternative (i.e. RStudio for R), those are the first two places I'd point people looking for a code editor on Mac. Granted neither is perfect, but surely if I had a list of ten programming tools, one or both would make it.

Some people are complaining about VSC not being a _proper_ macOS app, but Affinity Photo and Designer are on the list (and I love all of them; the newest addition to the family, Affinity Designer, is quite… revolutionary) and yet I can cmd+click on the window title and get full folder path [1] in VSC and not in Affinities. Even Sublime Text doesn't allow me to do this.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

> I can cmd+click on the window title and get full folder path (...) Even Sublime Text doesn't allow me to do this.

You mean like this: https://imgur.com/a/0Aqvjs5 ?

It totally does...

You're right, Sublime does offer this option. I was probably checking on an unsaved buffer.

Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc. The latter requires tons of plugins and config to get anywhere near the featureset of the former while the former often seem to have way too many knobs hidden behind collapsible panels on the side. Sure, greybeards may dismiss this as "entitled thinking" when in the Good Ol' Days when people only needed ACME with no syntax highlighting or simply Ed. Sure, but you cannot deny the productivity boost of zero-config Intellisense autocompletion that works out of the box. Language Servers that get installed automatically with all it's dependencies etc. when the parent editor plugin is installed. Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell that required fiddling with PATH variables, jumping between FSF's poorly formatted documentation and the target language tooling. Do not mention its interaction with Python Virtualenvs; it still gives me nightmares. Getting Sublime Text working with stuff like Clojure etc. required tons of fiddling and watching YouTube videos that all differs slightly in methods. Many days were wasted editing Sublime Plugin configs and JSON files. VS Code forced editors like Atom etc. to up their game in performance, features, speed etc. Zero-config language setup and automatic prompting for installing plugins are now the norm thanks to the efforts of the wonderful VS Code team. The Vim plugin in VS Code is also second to none.

Also, a shout-out to Sublime Text for kick-starting the lightweight editor revolution in the first place, with it's cross-platform TextMate style interface and its beautiful Monokai UI color scheme. Kudos!

And for Lisp users, Light Table and Nightcode deserves praise for helping to modernize Lisp and demolishing Emacs' forced monopoly that turned off so many interested beginners. Well done Chris (and team) and Zach, thank you for bringing fresh blood and perspectives!

>Configuring Emacs was a special kind of hell.

A "good enough" solution in emacs is actually quite easy nowadays using the "use-package" macro.

Have they fixed the dependency management issues yet? Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience. Also, those horrendous TLS compromises Emacs' made in the name of "user freedom".

>Last I checked Spacemacs required mirroring all the packages just to get somewhat close to a modern plugin installation experience.

Not sure about Spacemacs as I use vanilla Emacs, but assuming you have use-package installed (and MELPA enabled if the package you're looking for is from there), it's just a matter of adding use-package declarations like this to your config:

    (use-package magit
      :ensure t)

Don't use Spacemacs. Problem solved.

https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el is really good.

After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac. Especially one so crucial to their workflow.

> After dealing with Microsoft’s subpar effort in porting their apps to Mac you won’t find too many people who will enthusiastically install another MS product on their Mac.

Subpar effort in porting? They've been excellent for something closing in on a decade now. And VS Code is practically a mainstay with mac developers now.

Are you talking about Office or something else? Do you actually think the Office port is good? I’m surprised how bad it is every time I use it. Excel is soo sluggish and to me everything feels a bit off and non-native in the ux. (Vscode is good though)

Office is fine? I mean, yes, it feels "non-native," but there's not much left that feels "native" anymore. The concept is as dead as brutalist architecture. And it's not sluggish at all on my 2015 MB Pro.

Of the three dozen or so apps on my work Mac, Mircosoft Office and Adobe are is the only ones that don't adhere to the Mac UI.

Off the top of my head:

Drag a file thumbnail from Finder onto the program icon to open the file? Nope.

Click on the name of the file in the title bar to rename or move it? Nope.

I understand that MS wants to make the interface familiar for people who use Windows, but it really is a PITA, and I wouldn't use it if I didn't have to.

“Drag a file thumbnail from Finder onto the program icon to open the file? Nope.”

Maybe it wasn’t always that way but it works fine in the current versions of Office. I’ll give you that clicking on the title bar does not let you rename or move the file though right-clicking does show the path to the file and let you open the folder in finder where I guess you could do those things.

Four years ago, Mac Office was more sluggish and lacked a lot of features. Now, the performance is fine for such a full featured app and many of the missing features have been implemented.

You can argue that you don’t like Office in general but the Mac port is no longer embarrassing.

Excel on a Mac is better than Numbers. At least Excel can handle tens of thousands of rows without becoming unusable.

Excel for Mac, while better than Numbers, is worse than Excel for Windows on the same hardware.

Ignoring the missing functionality (power-anything), even the one ported is buggy. It manages to crash with the same ODBC drivers, that work fine with Windows version (namely psqlODBC).

A few of us are still bitter about Word 6 being a port, unlike 5.1.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-word/5x-mac

I should probably give that up. It was almost 30 years ago.

This is a rather selective account. Visual Studio 2003-2008 were quite lightweight (even for their time). Visual Studio 2010 was the last one that didn't need gigabytes of ram to use and Visual Studio after 2012 is a horror show. Visual Studio 2003 (though good luck getting it working) is actually a smaller footprint in memory than other lightweight editors and can normally do more.

There were editors that were fine before VSCode. There was BluFish, Kate, Jedit and those are the ones just off the top of my head. Also Notepad++ is still better than most editors and doesn't need to spawn a node process that slows a i7 machine to a crawl.

As for getting sublime text working, I never had the problems you describe. So Works for me I guess.

I'd swap Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. VS2010 is awfully slow even on a modern PC, whereas 2012 is much faster. In a previous job i had both of them installed and for some reason VS2010 had the project association instead of VS2012, leading to cursing and staring at the splash screen while waiting for the system to respond. In contrast VS2012 was MUCH faster.

To me it seemed that after deciding to rewrite the UI in WTF with VS2010 (VS2018 was native MFC) they decided to release it in essentially beta form and then fixed the performance with VS2012.

The more Visual Studio gets rewritten in .net the slower and more bloated it becomes. Even in 2003 though it's acceptable resource usage was a result of computers improving faster than the VS team could slow things down, in the late 90's it was a very bloated resource hog, the sort that people would upgrade their computers to use.

What's amazing is just how much more bloated it is now compared to the feature set of 20 years ago, there have been very few features added that I care about day to day and even many of them fall into the category of nice to have but not particularly resource intensive.

Note: Visual Studio Code != Visual Studio. Different code bases/projects with similar names.

> featureless editors like … Emacs

Org Mode

Magit

eshell

AUCTeX

SLIME

Gnus

notmuch

Calc

EWW

Simple Emacs Spreadsheet

ERC

TRAMP

Methinks we have different definitions of the word 'featureless.'

I think tramp is the only one of those for which vscode has an equivalent.

> Indeed, most people seem to forget the dark ages before VS Code. When you were forced to choose between either slow heavy weights like Visual Studio/Intellij (and its relatives PyCharm et alia)/Eclipse that took forever to start up without a SSD drive or fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc.

Emacs is not “featureless”. Just like VS Code, its a pretty bare-bones but powerfully programmable editor before you consider add-ons, and just like VS Code, the available add-ons for many languages make it reasonably competitive with (or beyond) heavyweight IDEs.

Dark ages is a bit extreme.

I’m a pretty heavy vim user, but I do recommend folks getting started to give VSCode a crack when they are getting started.

I’ve tried it myself, but I find that their vim plugin leaves a lot to be desired (or it did a year ago, when I last tried it). IdeaVim has been the best I’ve used.

Even better, Oni2 is a project to provide an out of the box editor running the text editor part on real Vim (or Neovim) but with a fancy GUI and VSCode features and plugins. No emulation necessary!

> fast featureless editors like Sublime Text, Gedit, Notepad++, Vim/Emacs etc.

How do you count any of these editors — especially Sublime, Vim and Emacs — as featureless? If anything, Vim and Emacs are more fully featured than VSCode and Sublime Text not exactly far behind. I haven’t used the other two during the last few years, so can’t really comment on the state of plugin ecosystem for them.

I feel like Visual Studio Code deserves a spot. Its open source, and free

Free as in beer, though. Not free as in freedom from being watched.

There's a version called VS Codium that removes all of the Microsoft nastiness. I use it for a couple of my projects and it's really nice.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on the VS Code team. I’m a huge fan of VS Code, however.

I’m not going to get into a whole thing about the telemetry in VS Code because I don’t think it will be helpful/productive, but I will point out that anyone who wants to turn telemetry and crash reporting off can do so in the Settings part of VS Code — no need to install a separate app [1]. As that page makes clear, however, individual extensions themselves may have their own telemetry that can be turned on/off in their own settings, assuming the developer has chosen to do that.

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry

Related topic - any idea why every single time I disable telemetry in Windows, it gets re-enabled in the next update no matter how many times I make it clear I don't want it?

Also, does VS Code ever do the same thing?

Absolutely no idea on Windows — but I’ll look into this and see if I can find an answer (which might be difficult because it may depend on your OEM or some other issues).

As for Code — it should respect your choice across updates — it’s a line in the settings.json file. If you use an extension like Settings Sync (which uploads the contents of your Settings file and your list of installed extensions to a GitHub gist), you can even insure that option will persist across other installs.

If you do a clean install or remove/alter that settings file, you would need to re-enable that, but it should persist.

Agreed... I use it pretty much everywhere at this point. Others may load slightly faster, or perform slightly better.. but it's consistent with the best plugin ecosystem of any editor I've used and performs way better than any full on IDE by comparison with a fair share of the features.

I personally find it hard to trust vs code due to Microsoft. For example, they snuck telemetry in their last windows 7 “security” update. I realize the community could fork it if they did so, but it’s still a bit weird. Maybe it’s just me

I agree and can understand, and indeed you can find vscodium which is a vscode version stripped down of all telemetry and information gathering tools present in vscode.

link: https://vscodium.com/

Nice, it's in homebrew too.

You now trust a random developer instead of MS not to do anything unwanted. Doesn't sound like it's solving anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com