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Comment by snicker7 | Hacker News Reader

You can still utilize code spaces with other IDEs and text editors. It’s just a matter of SSHing into them.

Oh yes I know. But the split VSCode process is where a key part of the value lies for me. Not just that my entire toolchain is there, including tests, etc... we've had that for years with vagrant, for example. But also that the actual IDE is running there, and all contained in the repo, is awesome. I never achieved that level of seamlessness and consistency even with vim.

Any luck getting other team members to use it?

I don't dictate IDE choice on my teams, but projects definitely end up with a very convincing "happy path". 75% of the Dev market uses vscode anyway, so I never got resistance to that level. And once .devcontainer is revisioned people would have to work to AVOID using the convenient, perfectly configured environment so no resistance there, either.

At that point, GH codespaces is a convenience tool, icing on the cake for when you want to make a quick edit during PR review, or when you're away from your desk. I saw devs use it that way (and did so myself) with no resistance.

But I have big caveats to my experience:

1) my only teams since this whole toolchain came into existence were joint microsoft/customer "build with" teams, so they were more positively predisposed to MS tooling than average.

2) I've never seen a team that uses web based codespaces EXCLUSIVELY.

Even though I know the difference between vscode-in-electron-with-remote and vscode-in-browser-with-auto-provisioned-remote is academic (and performance is probably better in the browser!)... I would still struggle with how ephemeral web apps feel to me on a gut level. Plus, as an old person I am uncomfortable when my toolchain isn't 100% local. I have nothing against the children with their cloud-powered toolchains, but it's hard for me.

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