Random examples of bad behaviour in commonly used parts that would affect just about every user:
If you try to search & replace, it'll refuse to remember "replace in selection". It'll reset every time, destroying your entire file instead of replacing just in the selected block.
If you do enable this feature, it'll change what you've selected, because... why?
Even with the feature enabled, the "search preview" will highlight matches outside the selection block! WTF?
There's no memory for recent searches, so if you've just spent ten minutes carefully crafting a regex and you accidentally click the wrong thing, then it is gone forever.
The recent files list isn't a list of recent files.
The console overwrites itself sometimes, resulting in gibberish output. It's particularly bad with PowerShell that uses Write-Progress. I've sat around for nearly an hour waiting for a process to complete, when in fact it was prompting me to continue. I couldn't see the prompt because it had overwritten it (incorrectly).
Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings.
Ctrl scroll up/down doesn't change the zoom (or font size).
Unlike most Microsoft editors like the PowerShell ISE or Visual Studio, MS Word, and most third party text editors, block select isn't alt-drag but middle-button-drag instead. No middle button on your mouse? No block select for you!
It's unfortunate that many new Microsoft languages are supported in VS Code only. It feels like a huge step backwards that's being forced onto an enormous community.
It has this now, although the click target is some teensy text.
(I also find the search very frustrating, like it replacing the search with your current selection sometimes)
I just tested a bunch:
VS Code: UP
Visual Studio: DOWN
Notepad++: DOWN
TextPAD: DOWN
IntelliJ: ALT+DOWN
MS Word: DOWN
Instead, it's yet another feaure where the VS Code team picked something at random without apparently ever having used any other text editor or IDE in their lives. Ever. Ever before. Of any type, from any platform. Certainly not Microsoft products on Windows.
It boggles the mind. Are they all JavaScript front-end developers with no previous IDE experience other than notepad.exe or something?
Wait... Electron. Ah. They probably are.
"Joy used a Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal. On this terminal, the Escape key was at the location now occupied by the Tab key on the widely used IBM PC keyboard (on the left side of the alphabetic part of the keyboard, one row above the middle row). This made it a convenient choice for switching vi modes. Also, the keys h,j,k,l served double duty as cursor movement keys and were inscribed with arrows, which is why vi uses them in that way. The ADM-3A had no other cursor keys. Joy explained that the terse, single character commands and the ability to type ahead of the display were a result of the slow 300 baud modem he used when developing the software and that he wanted to be productive when the screen was painting slower than he could think."
Yeah. Let's copy what a specific terminal did in 1976. That doesn't actually fit any modern keyboard layout. Brilliant. That's the standard to aim for! Not the most popular computer system on earth, by any metric. Nope. That's not the standard. The standard is the ADM-3A terminal, which probably fell into disuse before any of the Windows Terminal developers were born...
Did I mention the 300 bits per second terminal being the key design constraint? Oh, I forgot to mention that while entering this text on my gigabit fibre connection.
You're reading this on a phone? Is it 5G? Then it's faster than my fibre.
"constraints breed creativity" is the idea that you can end up with a better, more versatile solution -- rather than copping out at the first "good enough" solution. Of course, it's not guaranteed, but still. It's certainly possible that arrow keys are a mistake for total performance (arrows are trivially more visible, but also trivially greater motion from your other work). It's also certainly possible that modal editing is simply more effective than mouse & hotkeys, even if they were only designed because the mouse wasn't available.
Now, escape vs caps-lock-position, I'll give you freely, but generally its fair to judge a design based on current constraints, but not to judge (& discard) a design because it was designed other alternative constraints.
People continue choosing to use vi-keys (via vim, nvim, or even the many vim-emulation layers all over the place), even on modern high-speed connections, precisely because they still find "single character commands and the ability to type ahead of the display" valuable.
"The display" does not have to be a terminal display. In fact, a significant number of places vi-emulation is used don't even support terminal displays. "The display" can be anything the human waits for to reflect the actions of keys pressed. Once you consider this, the efficiency benefit of vi-keys becomes as clear as that of touch-typing.
The ADM-3A no longer matters. Vim does not use vi-keys because it ever targeted the ADM-3A. Similarly for Neovim, Evil, Tridactyl, Vimium, GMail (and so on). When I wrote a new vi-keys layer for a toy terminal multiplexer, I didn't use h-j-k-l for navigation because I wanted to target the ADM-3A — I didn't even know about the ADM-3A! I did it because I knew of the benefit of using those keys, even on the modern 100+-keys QWERTY-layout that I grew up on and still use.
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> .... my gigabit fibre connection.
> You're reading this on a phone? Is it 5G? Then it's faster than my fibre.
I cannot describe enough how much I hate this discriminatory excuse, and I live in the top two cities with the best internet connectivity in my country (for four years of my life in Mumbai, till 2020, I was one hop away from the Mumbai IXP). It is downright shameful how far people will stoop while using this excuse. An absolute minority of the population thinks it absolutely okay to build software that excludes users who don't have the absolute best hardware, just because they live in cities like SF or Seoul and are blind to the conditions of other humans. Most of these people aren't even aware how they are excluding people; that's how little they care. I can only wonder what the overlap is between this set of people and those that ignore accessibility.
You are fortunate enough to have a gigabit fibre connection (and possibly 5G) connecting you to servers from your continent, most of your time. But that is not a right you can expect others to have, and that fortune is far from universal. I am fortunate enough to have the access I do have when I have it, but I can only sympathise with the plight of those in Australia.
Australian here with 250mbit at home and 5G on my phone.
I still hate Electron apps though.
– Someone who has to work on servers in America & Europe from India, with 300+ ms latency via GCP's Premium Network
I'm not a fan of cloud anything anyway. We have these supercomputers in our pocket and on our desks, but we're meant to use them only as dumb terminals now?
I certainly don't find things unusable, but I can still remember the heady days of 300 baud modems and reading the text as it was generated on the screen.
So everything is amazing now and 300ms latency wouldn't bother me.
Even if it was 10 seconds, I'd just open a new tab and continue what I was doing and switch back to the original one when it eventually loaded.
> Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings.
There has been a GUI editor for settings for a while now, as well as the JSON editor.
The previous releases were markedly worse, and absolutely unusable for PowerShell. I've never seen anyone switch from ISE to VS Code willingly. I'm forced, because I'm using some modules that are core-only and required PS 7.0, which works with VS Code only.
It doesn't matter if it has "improved" a lot if it is still by far the worst text editor slash IDE on my computer. I have five others, including two free editors that are better. And faster...
There's necessary differences and quirks, and there's just... unfathomable hubris by the developers, to the level that it's almost an insult to their user base.
Why not alt-drag? EVERY Microsoft tool uses that shortcut EXCEPT for VS Code!
Was it not written by Microsoft developers? Is it conforming to a standard I've never heard of, a standard that nobody else at Microsoft has ever heard of either?
Why didn't they most simply and most trivially just copy the default keyboard shortcuts from Visual Studio? Wouldn't that have been easier for everyone?
Writing something "new" doesn't meant that you're forced at gunpoint to change standards, ignore commonalities, or just do a bad job. It takes the same coding effort to configure "alt-drag" as it takes to configure "middle-drag"! There is no time saved by being sloppy, or lazy. This isn't a corner being cut to save time, this is a reversing of the direction that the steering wheel has to be turned. That doesn't help you manufacture the car faster or cheaper, and it doesn't help drivers.
( I'm not being flippant, the VS Code team literally flips things for no reason. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27807085 )
Comparing VS Code to ISE is next level of wrong.
You mention mostly few search and replace bugs as a proof, but those are just bugs. There also is search history just behind a hotkeys.
While I agree that search needs some love, its hardly a show stopper.
My experience is exactly the opposite - VSCode has some of the best product quality I've seen from Microsoft ever, period.
VSCode does not indicate to the user when the save is complete. I've had saves require 15+ seconds, and they are not atomic, so you must be careful to not use the file (compile, git, etc) until the save is finished, which is hard to know. I've personally lost data this way.
I agree that command palette is great and is clearly a point of convergence among new apps. I wish Apple would embrace it!
If a save is complete, that dot will go away. If there is no dot, the file is unmodified.
Not sure what you program in, but that has not been my experience at all. C# (Unity), Golang, Python have pretty mediocre support at best in VS Code. What JetBrains' products do there is miles ahead, and tacking on countless extensions doesn't get you close to the out of the box experience, so I fail to see the point.
If I'm quickly editing a single file, sure I might fire up VS Code or Micro. For actual work though, the JetBrains products can't be beat (for me at least).
The refactoring, intellisense, and bonus features are hard to give up once you get used to them. A good Go debugger, actual Unity integration that inspects the scenes, references, usages, etc, or Python type hinting actually helping the development effort, are just some things that come to mind.
It's cool there's an open source editor that does most things quite well for sure, but a hundred dollars or so is extremely worth it, if you're even 1% more productive. I'd estimate the real boost I got from JB products is much higher, particularly when it came to Go and C#.