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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

As an example:

We have a build for a giant xyz customer system. Every part of the codebase is modern; it has thousands of JUnit5 test cases, 26+ modules. We've set the build up "correctly": following Maven best practices and it turns out, when you follow them, things are really quick with builds just under a few minutes.

Eclipse does an amazing just handling a project this size. It also is able to do things VsCode simply cannot do. We had a enum we needed to move from a submodule to a a global one. Eclipse found all of the references, including ones in our documentation, strings, test cases, and even prop files for runtime config, and refactored the whole thing in a few clicks. We've had the same experience with IntelliJ actually too, where the tools are even more refined.

Eclipse/IntelliJ are on a different plane. VsCode does have it's merits, but it's not really a full blown IDE.

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This. I wish more users that prefer quite primitive text editors would broaden their horizons and learn at least one proper IDE. It's been honestly quite funny reading comments for the past few years about how amazing e.g. jump to definition is (compared to grepping and navigating manually) like it's some great new thing when we've had it in every IDE for decades (and much, much more). I remember using autocompletion/jump to definition/various refactorings in Borland IDEs back in 2004, and they were surely available long before then.

The level of code refactoring tools available in IDEA dwarf anything vscode has been able to come up with, and I don't see that changing. And it's not just for Java (although it gets the best tooling), they're the best for every language that has any popularity at all. Including TypeScript, where IDEA has a significantly better performing lsp features than vscode.

For example, it automatically finds copypasted code (including cases where variable names and code structure might differ) and can automatically extract a single implementation and generalize it for you with a single key press. If you have multiple classes with similar interfaces, it can extract the common bits into an interface and update the classes to become its implementations. It can shuffle types and methods around for you, automatically updating references (which you've mentioned). Autocompletion for absolutely everything, including difficult cases like e.g. SQL inside a Rust snippet inside Markdown. And much more.

Exactly^ It’s honestly incredible. I find it hard to switch languages _because_ the tools are so good.

Is there ar particular reason why VSCode does does not perform at these refactoring features? Has it something to do with the underlying technology or did nobody implement it properly yet?

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