> new UI project
It’s incredible to me how many people choose VS Code because of its aesthetics, so it is by all means the right thing to focus on.
It’s incredible to me how many people choose VS Code because of its aesthetics, so it is by all means the right thing to focus on.
No. VS code is popular because it's
1. Free and open source
2. Come with a lot of official extension [1]
3. Backed by MS which has the incentive to commondize code editors
It's quite similar to Chrome.
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Microsoft
But I have personally heard people more than one person completely dismiss JetBrain's IDEs because they didn't like how they looked.
Honestly, I doubt most people even care it's kind-of open source (1).
> 1. Free
This is the reason most people use vscode.
That's it.
It's free, and it's pretty good.
It's not better. It's just free.
Nothing wrong with liking free stuff; free stuff is great; but don't confuse 'it didn't cost me anything' with 'it's good'.
There's a difference between value (ie. for what you paid, you got something that was worth significantly more than you paid, which in this case is zero) and quality (independent of cost, the thing is just plain old good).
vscode may be more valuable to people than jetbrains products, but it isn't a higher quality product.
There's a massive difference between those two things.
[1] - It's not open source 'technically'. https://ruky.me/2022/06/11/im-switching-form-vs-code-to-vs-c...
Average users might not care. But extension authors do. Yes, of course you can write extensions for close source projects, but it'd take longer to do "hacky" things since you'll need to read decompiled code / memory stack to understand its internals. I remember a very popular extension used a private field (and later broke because VSCode changed its internal implementation).
I personally constantly check Blender's source code here and there during the development for our internal Python tools, so I suppose people who write VSCode extension sometimes do.
> (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?).
It means VScode benefits MS indirectly and they can keep it free indefinitely while being a for-profit company.
I paid for Sublime Text 3 back in the day and still pay for Rider. I prefer VS Code to Sublime Text 3 as it's more extensible for the kinds of environments I work in, and has some decent built-in amenities like version control and debuggers.
It's not better than Rider objectively (and it's not better by design. MSFT doesn't want to cannabalize Visual Studio), but for smaller scripting and editing it runs circles around Rider. I prefer using it when I know I'm not going to be coding something complex nor for hours on end. A great complimentary tool to have on end.
But if you have a "good" alternative as this lightweight c#/c++ editor, let me know. Someone recommended Zed but that is Mac only.
And VS Code is not only similar to Chrome, it is Chrome pretending to be an IDE, and that always leaves a nagging feeling of inefficiency in the back of my mind. The JetBrains IDEs, being Java-based (although they hide it really really well, installing their own OpenJDK-based runtime automatically), are also resource intensive, but still better than Electron...
VS Code is nice in that it strikes a good balance between a Text Editor and full blown IDE. Far from replacing the latter, but I can and have worked on medium sized projects exclusively in VS Code.
A few other aspects: - dark mode by default - web tech UI, not terminal - decent looking widgets and decorations
I don't think these are the main selling points for vscode, but they do all of this better than their competitors.
But I think the reason VS Code has become so popular is that along with its editor centric UI it has Emacs like extensibility. Plugins are easily written in JavaScript and it originated the Language Server Protocol which makes it possible to write language integrations in the target language.
I've not used the newer version of IntelliJ since the redesign, but I always found it somewhat overwhelming, with all this stuff which prevented me from focussing on the code I was writing. The old version had pretty poor UI performance too, whereas the VS Code UI is fast enough that I rarely notice any UI slowdown.
Nevertheless IntelliJ is pretty indispensable for Java/Kotlin development. It's code sense features are excellent and there are a lot of projects out there that don't really build except through IntelliJ's automatic Gradle setup.
FWIW the only pop-up like things I see with VS Code are extension suggestions when I open a file with a new language extension and the monthly update change logs.
In VS Code, I usually see a file explorer, the files I have open, the Problems panel and a terminal panel. All of the other stuff is hidden behind sections that, when clicked, simply replace the file explorer. Far less visual clutter
Complicated GUIs (most GUIs targeting 'advanced' users, IME) likewise cause sensory/attentional overload for me, as well. If an escape from that kind of design is part of what drives people to VSCode, I totally get it! For me, keybindings and a command palette (or similar) are a much more natural way to include lots of cuntionality in an app without making it overwhelming to navigate visually.