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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see VS Code gain more users each year whilst other popular editors/IDEs lose users.

Not necessarily an indication of actual user base; could just be that more/less devs of each "group" are deciding to participate.

Side note; I decided to move from PyCharm to VSCode and honestly, I am starting to miss PyCharm. Yes, it's sluggish to boot but it handles Python so much better: better inspection, highlighting, better Git integration (3-way merge!) and better tooling all round.

I find myself having to mess around in VSC's settings.json for far too long, scrambling to find the relevant extensions documentation because god forbid you include all the keywords somewhere easy to find in the IDE! And to top it all off, there's currently some annoying bugs with error highlighting in VSC that make it a pain to use.

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> Not necessarily an indication of actual user base; could just be that more/less devs of each "group" are deciding to participate.

Could be also AOC getting more popular and hitting the developer mainstream more, hence skewing the percentages more in favor of mainstream tools. The absolute number of devs from "fringe" groups might have stayed constant.

Though VS Code is also getting quite popular in general, so probably that too. It is quite lightweight, just works and setting up new languages is a matter of a few clicks. Honestly the only reason I am not using it (other then not trusting or wanting to support Microsoft), is that the VIM emulation does not feel quite right for me.

FYI you can use VSCodium, the de-Microsoft version, with the neovim plugin, which uses real neovim and not emulation.

https://vscodium.com/

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetlia...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4dXZ0RQWdw

(As a newb I'm finding this to be a good way to learn vim without massacring my productivity.)

Or that using an editor instead of an IDE doesn't matter as much for these small tasks where everything fit in one file?

I'm a big JetBrains fan, and now use PyCharm at work. But there is something about Python making IDEs not as useful as it is in other languages. Too much magic and weirdness in the language makes it harder for tools to do a good job.

The whole "VS Code is an editor, not an IDE* argument doesn't hold water anymore.

There are decent to great LSP clients for many languages. VS Code has git integration. And by far the richest plugin ecosystem of any editor/IDE.

Yes the Intellij solutions are often better and top notch for languages like Python/PHP/Go/...

And everything feels more integrated and coherent.

But VS Code is still very far beyond a dumb text editor.

I just tried VsCode for Java development. Frankly I wasn't expecting much as Java is one of those languages that requires a lot of ide features to be useful. Previously used heavyweights like eclipse and Netbeans.

And you know what? Installing the official Java plugin results in a really nice experience. The debugger is good, the hints and documentation work. Not tried the refactoring tools under anger yet though. I didn't have to touch any of the settings.

Hats off to Microsoft.

I haven't really used it extensively, but so far VS Code reminds me of that quip people used to make about Emacs a long time ago: it is a pretty good operating system but needs a decent text editor.

I don't do anything that needs or even benefits much from a ton of extensions. I'd expect someone who is would find VS Code amazingly useful (unless they were overwhelmed by the very large number of available extensions).

Extensions are imporant to give you full support for a given language which essentially turns VSCode from a text editor into an IDE for said language. The rest of it is small modifications, cosmetic changes and convenience.

I think a major selling point of vscode is that it can productively edit anything. Your project happens to include some secondary languages like markdown, yaml or css? No problem. Same for polyglot developers or codebases. This way you never run into the limits of a language-specialised IDE.

I’ve started using VS Code with Python recently.

There was an unpleasant surprise in that Pylance silently pulls unvetted third-party typings with not even an opt-out—resulting in typing mismatches across versions, in addition to generally exhibiting too implicit of a behavior for my taste. (Coming from Python pre-typings originally, I have grown to appreciate TypeScript’s model where user is asked to install typings explicitly if missing.)

So I ended up using VS Code with Python extension but Pylance overridden as disabled, and with mypy and flake8 installed in your environment (and enabled in VSC) it actually works fairly well, showing errors and warnings from both.

Can’t remember whether I had to edit settings.json or not, but it took some time to hunt down relevant settings.

> I decided to move from PyCharm to VSCode and honestly, I am starting to miss PyCharm.

I'm a vim user and had to use PyCharm on a previous job, and it wasn't half bad. I'd take IntelliJ before VSCode if I had to.

> Not necessarily an indication of actual user base; could just be that more/less devs of each "group" are deciding to participate.

I found no data regarding this, but I have the impression that new developers are getting into VSCode, and maybe those younger ones are skewing the editor/IDE usage. I'd like to see a survey about editor/IDE migrations, it would be interesting to see where people start and with what people settle.

To find settings of an extension I always use the settings gui, it has way better discoverability, so far searching for the name of the extension and approximate keywords yielded the setting I needed quite quickly. I use settings.json to check or change settings I already know, and for sharing them with others.

It matches the WakaTime results (not a survey, just stats on IDE usage when WakaTime plugin is installed).

https://wakatime.com/a-look-back-at-2020

Change the url to 2021 to see the new results after midnight Jan 1 2021.

anecdotally this year was the year that made me switch to vscode after being an emacs user for a long time (last exception still being clojure/cider)

Two points were Dendron which finally is a good enough org-mode replacement for me and the lack of having to battle with extensions and packages in elisp. Config sync as well as the pretty much one-click full setup for almost every language is pretty great.

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