Ask HN: What do you wish was better about your IDE, or code editor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you wish was better about your IDE, or code editor?

11 pointsianbutler25 comments

Do you believe your programming development environment could be better? What are some frustrations you have with it now or some features you wish you had that you feel like are real blockers to the work you do everyday?

It'd be nice if you reply if you include the language you work in too!

View on HN

One thing I'd like to see in PyCharm (or any IDE that supports Python) is automatic maintenance of .pyi stub files.

The recently introduced type hints [0] can be inserted inline, but they are ignored at runtime; alternatively, the hints can be relegated to separate stub files [1] which just contain the typing annotations for the classes and functions defined in their .py counterparts.

It would be helpful if an IDE would display the full annotations inline, but saved them only in the stub files, leaving .py files "hint-less".

[0] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/#stub-files

I use VS Code and primarily use JS, jQuery, webpack, and SASS.

I like having two projects open in the same VS Code window (the project I'm working on and a past project I'm referencing), and it would be nice if I could use two different themes to distinguish them.

For instance, the background and tab colors of Project A would be a very dark grey and the background and tab colors of Project B would be dark blue.

Doing this would allow me to see which file belongs to which at a distance---for instance, both projects have files that are named the same like main.scss and index.js.

What I'll do is have everything from Project A on the left side and Project B on the right, but I have confused myself a few times in the past, so being able to set themes would be quite nice.

>I like having two projects open in the same VS Code window (the project I'm working on and a past project I'm referencing), and it would be nice if I could use two different themes to distinguish them.

You could do it. Cmd + Shift + P and then "Workspaces: Add Folder to Workspace"

C# / UWP / Visual Studio 2019 + Resharper

- Compile time sucks big time (that's related to WinRT/UWP). - I really need it to be 64bit, to handle large projects. Apparently, it will happen on Visual Studio 2022, which is awesome news!

Intellij every time I open a project it takes 10min~ to 'index' the directories. Not new projects, projects that have been indexed before and not changed since the last time I opened them in the editor.

- One IDE that fits all environments. I'm a bit tired of having to switch between: Vim, PyCharm, GoLand, etc.

- Lightweight. Don't mind if the initial load takes a bit of time

- Easy replicable configuration at ~/.THE_IDE/config, so that one can just share the config file and any other person can reproduce your IDE environment (e.g., debugging settings, colorscheme, shortcuts, etc.)

- Free. Although I wouldn't mind paying once (no subscriptions)

- Works as a GUI and as a CLI (e.g., GVim and Vim)

Have you tried emacs?

/0.5_s (only half sarcastic)

serious tho Doom Emacs might just be what you need, depending.

I haven't, but I'm kinda very used to Vim, so I think the change would be painful :)

Doom Emacs and Vimmode take that into account. Many have made the change.

YMMV, but emacs is more of an operating system masquerading as a word processor while Vim is a very nice trim and powerful word processor.

/evangelical_mode_off

Sorry, not Vimmode, Evil Mode, der

For me personally since I didn't throw this out there when I asked the question, I'm a VIM person, and I hate that every time I have to review code, look up code, leave a comment on code. I have to leave my editor. Most collaboration happens outside of my editor and it interrupts my flow a lot. I want to be able to deal asynchronously without it interrupting me while writing code with most of my development process from a single place.

I wish PyCharm could finally fix a 4 years old bug where code within libraries installed in edit mode cannot be followed when working with remote interpreter. Please, please, please, give thumbs up so they fix it :)

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-25868

My IDE is VS2017. I'd like a couple of things:

1. It would be nice to right click on a file in the solution explorer and have the menu include "Open File Location".

2. When working with C++, it would be nice is it helped with #include's i.e. give me the relative pathname. Don't make me compile it to find out if the file address is right.

Excel VBA Editor. I never understood why they have not adapted it to act like Visual Studio/Code.

PyCharm / IntelliJ Rust plugin:

- Faster and more responsive - Separate mode for individual (non-project) files.

Using Jetbrain products as well as VS2019 and VSCode occasionally. One thing I'd really hope to achieve is to easily define some editing behaviors and script it into a shortkey. I can probably do it using IDE scripting though so I need to look into it.

Android Studio. I wish it was faster. On a machine with SSD and 8 GB RAM, it can take 5 min to compile. It sucks up most RAM while it does this, so I can't even browse the internet or play Spotify in the background anymore.

Structural editing of HTML and React’s JSX a la paredit.

I'm on emacs with spacemacs (long live spacemacs) using python and lisp. Everything's hunky dory. My IDE is not my bottleneck.

What is your bottleneck?

Sorry to disappoint, but coding being a hobby and juggling a dozen other things in my life

No disappointment, perfectly valid :)

Thanks :)

I usually run under the assumption that I'm in the minority with most users here using code to put food on the table.

I want voice command integration. Hey computer pull up this GUI. Run this test. Pull up terminal. Check out last branch and git fetch

VSCode has a fairly straight forward tasks.json specification for creating arbitrary commands that it can run. Presumably it wouldn't be too hard to add some Voice Recognition + NLP layer on top of this. You could even build it as an extension.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com