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Comment by BaculumMeumEst | Hacker News Reader

VS Code people: how do you not go crazy when you try out a new language? I just opened up a love2d project I've been working on and everything has error squiggles. Do y'all just spend hours getting your tooling figured out every time you try something new or do you just disable diagnostics?

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What would you do in Emacs? The reason I switched to VS Code was exactly because I could instantly get set up with most languages by installing an extension, instead of messing around with Elisp configs and a hodgepodge of packages. I couldn't even figure out how to set up a working Java environment in Emacs.

I don't really do anything fancy. I use citre and ctags for goto definition and use buffer and tag based autocomplete.

Spending time fiddling with extensions makes me want to stick forks in my eyes, but I'm genuinely curious if other people just generally suck it up and get it figured out or if they just ignore error squiggles a lot.

I would never go anywhere near Java with Emacs though, I would just bust out Intellij or Eclipse for that.

I once happened to be with a coworker setting up VSCode on his new laptop. I was shocked by the reckless abandon with which he installed all kinds of third party extensions.

First thing I do with a new Jetbrains IDE is add a bunch of plugins. It’s pretty much the way most IDEs roll.

Do you worry about malware?

Doesn’t the average emacs user load dozens of packages? I know I do. Malware crosses my mind, but it would be a lie to say I do a fully audit of every package I use.

The surprising part for me wasn't that he was installing packages. It was that he just did a super fast search-click-install loop, where many of them had handful of ratings max, some even 3 stars or less. I'm used to checking out the Github repo of the package first, considering how many stars it has, how many releases there have been, etc before adding it to Emacs.

But you bring up a good point. Perhaps installing packages willy nilly is orthogonal to the editor choice.

Just ignore it. Errors will be fixed or deactivated with time. Especially with something new, there are already enough things to figure out, error squiggles are just another bag of noise.

It’s not hugely different than working with a new project in a fancy IDE, once you figure out adding generated sources, aiming the tools at the right config files if everything’s not in the root, etc. If you’re lucky they’ve set up a docker-compose.yml to get started with, otherwise you have a couple hours work ahead. It’s a one-time cost you don’t have to pay again unless you wipe and clone the project from scratch.

I vastly prefer IntelliJ, but project setup on vscode has never been a major speed bump in my shop.

I guess we don't until there are supporting extensions.

Or we switch back to vim.

> love2d

For Lua last time I tried I just did not install any Lua extension, just use the native syntax highlighting and move on.

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