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Comment by AdamN | Hacker News Reader

VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE and that's either a JetBrains product or Visual Studio (xcode for Apple).

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I must be Benjamin Button then :). I feel it's the reverse: juniors need all the IDE support they can get for more context, seniors can do more with less.

I gave up on IntelliJ after failing to stop the frequent re-indexing that would make my workstation unusable, and restarting the IDE would trigger another re-index which could succeed, or hang. I hope they fixed that, but I didn't stick around to find out - and I had been paying for a license for years out of my own pocket too. VSCode just reminded me that I don't have to wait needlessly - I had become inured to slow IDEs.

I find IntelliJ to be quite fast. How big is your project?

This was many years ago, but IIRC, it was about 7-10kLoC at the time. Would you say IntelliJ is as fast as VS Code?

It's a subtle question. I'd say IntelliJ is less responsive, but I wouldn't say it's any slower. When stressed, IntelliJ's UI will get choppy and usually show a progress bar at the bottom. VSCode tends to keeps running at 60fps and stick a plain "Loading..." string somewhere in the UI.

This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive. Primitive IDEs and text editors may help your geek cred score, but as a long term java dev who's moved into Kotlin and go recently, vs code was borderline terrible and very limited in what I wanted in features. I never used intellij until my most recent company (eclipse mostly beforehand) but they really do a good job at streamlining the dev flow. I do miss eclipses much more dynamic layouts and arguably better integration with some external technologies, but idea's Kotlin integration has been top notch and makes for quite brisk in-the-flow coding experience like no other.

As for hitching and speed, intellij has a poor 15 seconds on my laptop before it's super snappy and basically never drops perf whatever I'm hammering at. I think the common feature rich IDE slowness strawman is a defence for what's better expressed as an opinion. If you like featureless ides, have at it.

> This feels like a crock statement. A Sr developer who's efficient uses every tool at their disposal to be efficient and productive.

Correct: and in my case, VS Code with my customizations (plugins + configs) is more than equal to the task, it does everything I'd want from a full-blown IDE, and does it in a snap. Being disrupted by your IDE is maddening because it only happens when you're in deep focus.

My IDE journey was similar to yours Eclipse -> Jetbrains, then what started off as a casual affair with VS Code on personal projects ended up being serious indeed.

I felt like it was easier to add features I want to VS Code than to remove/disable fearures from IntelliJ to trim the fat, YMMV. I'm glad to hear IntelliJ s now consistently fast after initialization - when I last used it, the slow downs were unpredictable and lasted minutes, and occasionally required restarting the IDE, but that was a long time ago, back when SSD storage was expensive.

Vscode is all dandy and fine until you try to debug something and inspect an object in memory only to find out that msft programmers hard coded the object representation as a string [Object object] cause they couldn’t be bothered to properly implement the debugger.

This is unbelievably inaccurate.

The opposite for me, I'm one of those psychos who switched from VS to VSCode, and the majority of what I write is in C#. I decided I wanted to get extremely familiar with the dotnet CLI and how all of the tooling and build systems work, instead of relying on the conveniences provided by Visual Studio.

How do you handle profiling/debugging and the many more things that VS does?

Debugging is fine, you can attach a debugger from VSCode no problem. For profiling, the truth is I usually don't profile lol. But if I did I would just use JetBrains' dotTrace.

Shots fired! Didn't know Rob Pike can't even pass up as a junior - the man doesn't even use syntax highlight.

How "general" is Rob Pike though, I wonder? I'd say he's exceptional, given his track record.

At least four star general

Visual Studio (Full, not Code) has a Mac version now, albeit it's a totally different codebase to the Windows edition (AFAIK a much updated version of what was MonoDevelop).

> VS Code users are generally pretty junior or solo. Once a developer gets serious they'll usually need to go to a full IDE

If you mean exclusive "VS Code users" then maybe.

As an IDE user for one file type (in my case *.cs ) I still find VS code a very useful tool for any other file types. I can install linters and formatters for them, e.g. for yaml, json, xml, text etc. and VS code then makes a great editor, hits a good spot between "still fairly light and fast" and "has features".

An IDE focuses on one task. VS code complements it by being a "swiss army knife"

After Crockford's "js is scheme" claim, curly emacs was bound to eventually happen. If you come to VS code from e.g. IntelliJ, the UI is surprisingly opaque, considering its undoubtedly graphic nature. Not quite C-m M-c M-butterfly opaque, but not that far from it.

> If you come to VS code from e.g. IntelliJ, the UI is surprisingly opaque, considering its undoubtedly graphic nature

You don't need to memorise all the things in VS Code, just know to open the "Command Pallete", and that's on the menu.

That works just about the same way in intellij.

IJ does have the "search everywhere" that can be used like the command palette, but it's still far from abandoning the idea of trying to make everything available in menu trees and the like. Plugins add cute pictures to the toolbar like it's 1999. VS:C is far more radical, there's The Palette and that's it.

Wow that hurts.

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