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Comment by NoahKAndrews | Hacker News Reader

What are you using VSCode for that the stable JetBrains IDEs don't do well?

I use JetBrains products as my main IDEs, but then fire up VSCode for smaller editing tasks on things like Ansible Playbooks and Terraform scripts, as there are official plugins for VSCode that are so much better than anything I've found on the Jetbrains marketplace.

It's good to enter a directory, type 'code .' and do some quick editing without the Jetbrains process of creating a project around the directory.

And I've grown to like the VSCode terminal, with side markers to help scrolling back to the start of a run and any errors.

Having said that, there are all sorts of things I miss from Idea or Webstorm when using VSCode, like great integrated Git and local history support. You can kinda sorta get close with a collection of VSCode extensions, but it doesn't feel as cohesive or polished to me. And that diff viewer is very Visual Studio, whereas the Idea one seem much more polished to me, like Perforce.

Maybe it's just what you're used to, and I've spent a lot of time in Idea and Webstorm. So for a large codebase, I'd definitely be inclined towards Jetbrains. As others have mentioned, the code discovery, navigation, and refactoring facilities are second to none. Not surprising as it's been continually developed as an IDE (rather than an editor) since 2001.

> as there are official plugins for VSCode that are so much better than anything I've found on the Jetbrains marketplace

It's a damn travesty what JetBrains has done to the CloudFormation plugin and by close-sourcing the terraform plugin then basically abandoning it. I'm aware there is a commercial ansible plugin but my experience with it is that it's not worth the money to me when, as you pointed out, the vscode language server for ansible does a fine job for the yaml, but sadly does nothing for the jinja2 snippets therein

IntelliJ IDEA does have LightEdit mode to handle this use case: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/lightedit-mode.html

Thanks for the link... I checked out LightEdit, but it sounds like it leaves quite a lot behind :

"..and it doesn't support the usual IDE editor features such as code completion, or code navigation."

I remembered it's possible to use the Jetbrains Toolbox tool in order to generate shellscripts for command line startup. So 'ws .' when generated will do the same thing for WebStorm as 'code .'

They don't do containerized development well. VS Code + docker for development "just works", as of 2023 there is still no similar workflow in PyCharm. You have to start the container and treat it like an SSH target.

Alternatively, why would I want to use Jetbrains over VSCode?

Depends on the language you use really.

CLion is the best cross platform C++ and Rust IDE there is imho. Everything from target management, to debugging integration and integration with CMake (no having to go back and forth with generated projects) is so head and shoulders above alternatives.

Rider is similarly so well tuned to game development needs. There’s tons of quality of life features in the IDE for Unity and Unreal developers.

PyCharm Pro has great multi language support within a single file which is great for web frameworks, and an integrated database inspector too.

But I’d go back to the : “why would I want to use X over Y?”

I use both. VS Code for small projects and quick edits. Jetbrains for larger projects where I need the better tooling like inspection and refactoring. They’re complementary.

That said, I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as efficient a dev if I didn’t have my Jetbrains stuff on hand. I could replace VS Code with any number of smart text editors like sublime or fleet instead.

I used CLion for the longest time but it's just so sticky and slow. VSCode with the clangd plugin is blazing fast.

> I use both.

I mostly don't get the all chips in a single IDE people. None of them are perfect for everything. Be glad there are options and use what works best for you for the task at hand!

Like with everything, you can either learn a bunch of tools on the surface or only a few of them deeply. And there's quite a lot of depth to the JetBrains tools.

I use mostly CLion, PyCharm and Android Studio from JetBrains. I get what you mean, but about depth and getting really good with a single tool, most of time I have more success in this with command line tools, as their interface almost never changes, the knowledge can pile up in little steps.

With graphical UIs (hi Xcode) I mostly don't see big benefits of getting that much of depth as productivity gains can be swiped off by software updates - or alternatively, by switching projects with different technologies.

Well, there's basically no alternative (CLI or otherwise) for the Java tooling with the quality Intellij provides ...

I don't think the Rust story is that simple. They've got the best Rust debugger, but I'm skeptical about their decision to build their own intellisense. Everyone else is using rust-analyzer, and r-a is getting better and better. Intellij Rust started off quite solid, but it's fallen behind in innovation.

Things like proper analysis of code in branches of the select macro matter a lot to me.

A serious alternative is neovim together with lsp plugins. You can set up a preconfigured neovim such as lunarvim and after learning a few shortcuts you are 90% the way what Clion offers. It isn't totally easy to get into it but at least for coding it is very productive. Debugging is another story I haven't really touched until now.

If you are happy with VSCode you probably aren't doing the things Jetbrains IDEs excel at.

That said: Language support - specifically Java and Kotlin are absolutely top tier. CLion is easily the best Rust IDE also. Automated refactorings. Really really fast code search - caveat, indexing takes a while but it's worth it.

I've been developing a large Angular application and I got fed up with the flakiness of the Angular plugin in VSC. Sometimes jump to definition works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes error indicators are correct, sometimes they aren't.

With webstorm I don't have these problems. People will mock the indexing shenanigans of jetbrains IDEs but they get results. WebStorm can reliably refactor where I get anxious in VSC because it often misses some template references and webstorm's symbol search is reliable and fast.

It's a MUCH better debugger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBgLeRwjlAc

My own anecdotal experience.

- VSCode plugins don't seem to work as well or feel as cohesive for the languages I typically use, Go, Python, Typescript.

- Jetbrains debugging is much better

- I like the look of Jetbrains IDEs much better

- One IDE custom fit to each language

- Great git integration

I pop in to VSCode from time to time and I always seem to return.

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