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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

How is vscode not in the same league? JB feels way too bloated and slow and doesn't add anything significant over other offerings

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It's not even close. vscode can approximate JB IDEs but that takes pulling in plugins on your own, managing their configuration, and adapting when the setup inevitably breaks. JB IDEs bake in everything you can get via vscode plugins with documentation, a cohesive experience, and regular maintenance to keep them working for you. Concrete examples that are better in JB land for me: git conflict resolution, refactoring (in numerous ways), jumping to definitions, finding usages (especially on Python projects).

> It's not even close.

That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.

I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.

> I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.

Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.

One is a fancy code editor, the other is an IDE.

Yeah, every time I try to move from Webstorm to VS Code, I wind up going back because VS code is just too "generic".

I don't want to spend a lot of time finding, installing, and configuring the right combination of plugins to bring VS Code up to Webstorm level.

Also, I don't trust plugin/extension marketplaces anymore. There is lower exposure in having fewer dependencies.

Code intelligence (find usages, go to definition, refactor/rename/move, etc.) and debugging are on another level - more powerful, more reliable, with more edge-cases covered.

At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.

For dotnet, Rider runs rings around VSCode. Even using the Resharper plugin, VSCode is nowhere near the same functionality. I even use Rider above Visual Studio because it works way better for mobile and cross platform. VSCode runs okay on the same hardware as Rider, but it is all too manual to configure. VS2026 is a horrible bloated pig that constantly grinds to a halt on the same hardware.

When have you tried VS last? Since they went multi core, it’s usually very fast and it’s mostly R# slowing it down (though I read that improved, dunno).

I use Rider but need VS for some things.

Maybe there exist better ways, but I'd say every coworker I've seen in a VScode variant uses freetext search to find everything.

What about debugging and stepping into a DLL (decompiling it)? Out of the box DotPeek vs whatever vscode plugin you can set up.

But there's plenty of examples.

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