Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

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I wrote a piece that got some discussion here on VS Code (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-st...). After writing that piece and reflecting, I decided that VS Code did in fact have one weakness: It doesn't have an embedded browser. I even tried to start a conversation about it on the VS Code Dev Slack here's what I said:

> Any thoughts in integrating a browser into VS Code? Panic's just released text editor for macOS, Nova, has this feature. The obvious thing it gets you is a live updating preview of HTML files, but taking it further: With VS Code's development community, this seems like it could be the path forward for features like being able to instantly jump to editing the source file for a CSS rule or an HTML element from the DevTools, or jumping to a component's source file from the React DevTools. I'm aware there a couple of projects that have tried to do integrate a browser into VS Code, but nothing has really come to fruition yet, any thoughts?

(Didn’t get much of a response, but obviously no one would talk about this if they knew.)

The above summarizes my thoughts, but here’s another one: This is a key component of GitHub Codespaces. One of the weaknesses in remote development is the round trip between the developer server process and the browser is less seamless than when doing local development. The IDE-style debugger integration doesn’t work without running Chrome on the same machine for example.

Anyway, VS Code now doesn’t have any weaknesses that I’m aware of anymore.

The vscode dev slack is just normally quiet, I wouldn't chalk it up to some implicit secrecy about a project with a pretty open team.

VSCode extensions can render arbitrary html in web view tabs already. However they're sandboxed from the rest of vscode and communication between the browser page and rest of the ide is tricky. This is actually a bit painful if you want to debug something that uses a webview, since vscode's debugger won't step into the embedded window's runtime.

The other obvious win is browsing documentation.

It does have another big architectural weakness: no detachable windows (see issue #10121). Not impossible to fix but quite hard.

And while the embedded dev tools is very cool, especially for the headless browser, it only brings in even more windows in the main VS Code window. Notice how dev tools typically take the largest part of the screen. In many workflows it is beneficial to have the dev tools on a second or third monitor so it doesn't obscure the code.

I’d like to see some innovation on this front from VSCode or any of the major editors. The developer ui experience can easily be overlooked since we’re used to dealing with all kinds of hoops to do most of our work.

JetBrains Rider has tool panes that you can dock like "traditional" IDE tool panes, or break out into separate windows. Presumably other IntelliJ-based IDEs have the same capability.

I really like this feature when working with multiple monitors - I can keep the primary monitor "clean", with just the editor and solution explorer, and have the test explorer and test runner split vertically in a secondary portrait monitor monitor, and debug/console output in my laptop screen.

Isn't VS Code literally written in Electron? It would be the easiest thing to implement.

You still cannot use it for native GUI design, Forms, WPF, WinUI/UWP,... and thus no match for Blend/VS in this regard.

Well, people doing native GUI design and not doing it for mobile (where there is already XCode and the Idea-based Android IDE) are probably 1/100 of people doing web work, and of them most do it for Windows, so already have VS proper.

Well I was replying to

> Anyway, VS Code now doesn’t have any weaknesses that I’m aware of anymore.

For me no support for native GUI designers is a weakness.

Yeah, I'm just saying for the target group it's not a major one :-)

Same way it's not a good COBOL environment either

If Microsoft on their dungeons plans to ever replace VS with VSCode, given the JS/Electron influence going on across the company, then this is surely part of the target group.

If they reach that point they could trivially slap in a form designer. It's not like those are hard...

No background images without ugly hacks.

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