Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

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VSCode is really a text editor-in-IDE-clothing. Also, it's an Electron app and those are notoriously resource heavy.

~20 years ago I became an early IntelliJ user. From version 3 maybe? It's hard to recall. I've never looked back.

But I did try Eclipse and... I never got the appeal. For one, the whole "perspectives" thing never gelled with me. I don't want my UI completely changing because now I'm debugging. This is really part of a larger discussion about modal editors (eg vim vs emacs). A lot of people, myself included, do not like modal editors.

But the big issue for Eclipse always was plugins. The term "plugin hell" has been associated with Eclipse for as long as I can recall. Even back in the Subversion days I seem to recall there were 2 major plugins (Subclipse? and another?) that did this and neither was "complete" or fully working.

To me, IntelliJ was just substantially better from day one and I never had to mess around with plugins. I don't like debugging and maintaining my editor, which is a big reason why I never got big into vim or eclipse. I feel like some people enjoy this tinkering and completely underestimate how much time they spend on this.

For me, perspectives are perfect, because it provides me a perfect set of tools for everything I do at that moment. It's probably a personal choice, so I agree and respect your PoV.

The plugin conflicts were way more common in the olden days, that's true, however, I used subclipse during my Master's and it was not incomplete as my memory serves. It allowed me to do the all wizardry Subversion and a managed Redmine installation Assembla had to offer back in the day.

It's much better today, and you can work without changing perspectives if you prefer, so you might give it another shot. No pressure though. :)

Trivia: VSCode Java LSP is an headless Eclipse instance.

At a minimum, perspectives play very nicely with the plugins system.

Eclipse was created over that extremely interesting idea that you can write a plugin to do some completely random task, and have all of it reconfigured on the perfect way for that task.

But you can't have a rich ecosystem of plugins without organizing them in some way, and nobody ever created a Debian-like system for them as it's a lot of thankless hard work.

I’ve been using vscode for a few years now and while i find its search amazing, it doesn’t do much more for me. Its syntax highlighting is good, but the auto complete recommendations have been driving me insane recently.

Writing rails api with a nextjs ui, anyone got any suggestions on alternative paths i should take?

JetBrains solutions. It think it's called RubyMine.

This may not apply to you but I find it so weird how many programmers won't invest even a modest amount into software they'll use 8 hours a day every day. Particularly when we'll so easily spend money to upgrade RAM or buy a new PC.

RubyMine on a cancel anytime personal license is $22.90/month (or $229 for a year). That's nothing. I'd say just try it. If you don't like it, you might only be out $23.

I'm not a Ruby person so can't comment on that really. For Java (and C++) it's a lifesaver. Things like moving a file to a different directory and it'll update all your packages and imports. Same with just renaming a class or even a method.

The deep syntactic understanding Jetbrains IDE have of the code base is one of the big reasons I use them.

> VSCode is really a text editor-in-IDE-clothing.

This is kind of my problem with it. I'll use VSCode for typescript but I avoid it if there are other alternatives. The entire model of VSCode just doesn't jive with me.

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