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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

This. 1000x This.

I watch people navigate code in VSCode and I want to pull my hair out. Things that I don’t even think about are hard and/or require just falling back to search.

And before “there is a plugin for that”, I’m sure there is. I’m sure you can configure VSCode to be just as powerful as IDEA but the rank and file using it aren’t doing that work to install and configure a bunch of plugins. So, on average, VSCode doesn’t hold a candle to an IDEA.

With Aider I skip a lot of the copy/pasting but I’d still copy/paste to the browser before I left IDEA.

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>I watch people navigate code in VSCode and I want to pull my hair out.

For me it's the other way around, when I see someone using an IDE instead of a lean editor I see their struggle. Multiple seconds to open the IDE (sometimes tens of second), multi-hundred millisecond lag when opening a file, noticeable input lag. And when you have to edit a file your IDE doesn't understand, all you have is a bloated notepad.

I know I'm biased and I intentionally wrote this one-sided to counter your post. In practice, it just depends. Right now in my work I primarily edit scripts (up to a few hundred lines of code), do quick edits to various larger projects - sometimes few different projects a day - and read files in dozens of programming language (I only reall program in Python and C/C++, but I have to constantly consult various weird pieces of code). VsCode works great for me.

On the other hand, long time ago when I was working on large C# projects, I can't imagine not using Visual Studio (or Rider nowadays I guess).

Neovim works fine with massive codebases. Telescope is a bit slow sometimes, but given how long ripgrep takes on the same, I assume it’s simply a limitation of memory bandwidth, and not tooling.

> sometimes few different projects a day - and read files in dozens of programming language

+1 this is what brought me back to vscode after experimenting with goland. To me vscode better handles the heterogeneity of my daily work. In my workspace I can keep open: a golang codebase, a massive codebase consisting of yaml config files, a filesystem from a remote ssh connection, a directory of personal markdown notes, and directories of debug logs. In my experience jetbrains excelled at the single use case, but vscode won on its diversity.

I will say that the parent comment had me curious about goland again. But I suspect I really need to spend more time configuring my vscode setup. I spent years using emacs, and would love to have a helm-like navigation experience.

For literally multiple years I tried to convince a colleague of mine to try Rider. They're a diehard CLI and VS Code user. I made a video showing my workflow and how quickly I can navigate around and do refactors. Next day they were saying they couldn't believe it took them this long to use something better.

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