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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

I did it this way for about 20 years and recently moved to VSCode with its integrated terminal. It makes me feel pretty lazy and like I’m “cheating”, but there are some productivity benefits (LSP), and I’m less of a purist than I used to be. I maintained a blog about vim for 3-4 years, so I was pretty committed to that workflow back in the day.

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I know about VSCode's terminal, and the few times I've used it seems like an afterthought, bolted on, to the primary function of the program as an editor and file navigator. I don't live in the editor. I live in the shell. The editor is a sub function of living in the shell.

I actually think the VSC terminal is one of the few saving graces it has. Maybe not so much on *nix. It works well enough on Mac, but it really shines on Windows where you’ll have a much easier time running powershell, GitShell and WSL terminals within VSC than outside of it. It also has really good integration with the various Azure CLI tools.

I don’t think VSC is a very good IDE though. I have no idea why a Vim user would use it instead of upgrading to Neovim, and obviously doom emacs is the best choice but I do think the terminal is actually pretty good in VSC. At least on Windows.

on windows VSCode is a great way to remote into a VM with with a sane-er OS.

> I don’t think VSC is a very good IDE though

As someone who has only used inferior IDEs to VSCode (grimaces at the thought of Xcode) and who thinks that VSCode is very good, what exactly am I missing from better IDEs?

Vim/Emacs (and variants) are like a tailored suit. VSC is like an off-the-rack suit. It's a silly analogy but it's probably the easiest way to explain it. For me personally it's productivity, and things like LSP quality in languages which don't have very good VSC plugins. The vim plugin for VSC is pretty bad.

That being said, use what works for you.

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