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Interesting how many people have switched from vi/vim to vscode. Does anyone have stories of making a similar switch from emacs?

I currently use intellij for java work (because my employer pays for the license) but for most any other type of editing I use emacs. I'd be interested to see what other emacs users think of vscode.

I am currently switching from emacs to VS Code. I am using an emacs keymap and I must say, it is wonderful. For Python, I can per project easily select the right virtual environment, the "intellisense" like system is working very well, it is pretty fast and you can customize a lot of it.

I am expecting to slowly move out of emacs for my coding in the next few months.

Emacs will be kept because I have a lot of org-mode files to manage my company at a higher level (lot of tables with formulas to calculate several key indicators). On the longer term, they could be moved as Python notebooks with the rendering in VS Code.

So yes, I do think this is the editor which is going to move a lot of old coders out of emacs/vi/vim.

PS: The added bonus is that I easily get support of Go, Typescript, etc. without the need to "debug my editor". Just install the right extension, done.

I have some code that automatically builds virtualenvs for me - in directories (it overrides cd). With vscode, I can change the python interpreter, simply by giving it knowledge of where I store my venvs... with one variable!

I can't even tell you how hard that was with VIM.

> So yes, I do think this is the editor which is going to move a lot of old coders out of emacs/vi/vim.

That certainly seems a possibility, though I expect it may be somewhat dependent upon the language used, and whether the community around that language invests enough effort to develop vscode plugins for that language.

I am still faithful to my Emacs, but Visual Studio Code is this beautiful thing I can't take my eyes off.

As an editor, VSCode is still inferior (but improving at lightspeed). As an out-of-the-box experience, it blows almost everything else out of the water. Against my customized Spacemacs, it's still struggling.

But that renderer is gorgeous!

I had to start using vscode at a certain level because .net core doesn't have a free debugger (as it seems.) I would have to study vscode-omnisharp source to get a clue how the debugger actually works to use it in emacs - something I don't have time for.

But I started to use it more because the autocompletion is nice. It's not perfect, but out-of-the-box experience is nicer.

After a few months though working in it, I want to go back to Emacs, and as such, Emacs is usually running. Magit for example, or being able to split your screen up as needed, or quickly jumping between files, etc. is something that is burnt into my brain. VScode is terrible at these things.

I am watching the lsp-mode and lsp-ui projects. They seem promising because it answers a concern I have : I need to float between projects in different languages and want the typical set of IDE-like features in each one. It would be nice to have a single set of keybindings regardless of language, which vscode excels at now. VScode has a good debugging story out-of-the-box lsp-ui is promising because it is implementing vscode-like features (like peek mode).

Well, my story is that I switched to emacs mostly because org-mode and the decent Vim support that Spacemacs offered. While I tried doing my development in Emacs too, I ended up using VSCode for most of that.

One reason is that I kind of like the separation between Emacs for org-mode and another tool for development.

Another is that VSCode just kind of 'clicks' with my approach. As a freelancer, I often work on multiple projects at the same time. I can have various VSCode projects open, each with its own terminal processes.

I find myself still using Emacs for TRAMP stuff (remote SFTP editing of files) occasionally, but somehow using Emacs for properly working on projects never quite 'clicked' the way VSCode did. It's possible that I just haven't gotten comfortable enough with it yet, but so far I'm really loving the Emacs/VSCode setup. And I still occasionally use Sublime Text for one-off editing of bigger files.

My story was: vim (5 years) -> emacs (7 years) -> sublime (2 years) -> atom (1 year) -> vscode (2 years and counting).

Switch from vim to emacs is obvious. Switch from emacs to sublime was triggered by moving from Linux to MacOS (my Thinkpad was failing after diving in a tropical rain so I bought a brand new MacBook).

Same here ! Long time vim user, I switched to vscode 2 years ago an early adopter ! I absolutly love it! It still blows my mind that it's a JS app running in a browser !

What vim plugin(s) do you use? I remember installing one but the emulation did not quite work for jumping into code definitions and back (it'd jump, but going back wouldn't work correctly), so I moved back to pycharm for the time being (vim emulation worked better there for me).

I use this: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

You can also have it use neovim as the backend as well: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

Thanks!

A tonne of them, all managed by pathogen. I actually have a chunk of my bashrc that automatically reinfects my vimdir. Below are the ones I can easily grab. I also have a tonne of homebrew over the years, and a love/hate relationship with Jedi, YouCompleteMe and friends.

https://github.com/noahfrederick/vim-skeleton vim-skeleton

https://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar tagbar

https://github.com/tmhedberg/SimpylFold SimpylFold

https://github.com/nvie/vim-flake8 vim-flake8

https://github.com/kien/ctrlp.vim.git ctrlp.vim

https://github.com/hashivim/vim-terraform.git vim-terraform

https://github.com/hashivim/vim-packer.git vim-packer

https://github.com/hashivim/vim-vagrant.git vim-vagrant

git://github.com/rodjek/vim-puppet.git vim-puppet

https://github.com/fatih/vim-go.git vim-go

git://github.com/chase/vim-ansible-yaml.git

https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline vim-airline

https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline-themes vim-airline-themes

git://github.com/ekalinin/Dockerfile.vim.git Dockerfile.vim

Thanks, but, my bad (I also use some of those with native VIM). I was talking about VS code VIM plugins.

Ah... copypasta ho.

code --install-extension batisteo.vscode-django

code --install-extension bibhasdn.django-html

code --install-extension Compulim.compulim-vscode-closetag

code --install-extension donjayamanne.jupyter

code --install-extension donjayamanne.python-extension-pack

code --install-extension DotJoshJohnson.xml

code --install-extension ecmel.vscode-html-css

code --install-extension formulahendry.code-runner

code --install-extension formulahendry.terminal

code --install-extension ginfuru.ginfuru-better-solarized-dark-theme

code --install-extension Gruntfuggly.global-config

code --install-extension haaaad.ansible

code --install-extension himanoa.Python-autopep8

code --install-extension HookyQR.beautify

code --install-extension humao.rest-client

code --install-extension magicstack.MagicPython

code --install-extension mauve.terraform

code --install-extension ms-python.python

code --install-extension PeterJausovec.vscode-docker

code --install-extension tushortz.python-extended-snippets

code --install-extension VisualStudioExptTeam.vscodeintellicode

code --install-extension vscodevim.vim

code --install-extension vscoss.vscode-ansible

code --install-extension wholroyd.jinja

code --install-extension Zignd.html-css-class-completion

Over the past year I've cobbled together a few plug-ins for (neo)vim that mostly works for ruby+rails (thanks tpope!) - the one thing missing right now is tag support/"go to definition" for haml/scss on a legacy project.

My question: to you have go to definition/tags setup in va code w/vim - and if so, how have bound the keys to get there?

[ed: looks like a sibling comment answered this in part already]

Tpope has a magnificent tools that allow jumping into gems - and I'm curious if you have something similar for python - allowing you to jump from your code, to pip/egg/package code, to python stdlib code.. And maybe all the way to c source for extensions?

See: https://github.com/tpope/gem-ctags And much more

Hi, I'm the guy who coded that part of VSCodeVim, and I specifically made it work for that case. gd and ctrl minus should always work to go to definition and back. It's possible you tried it when it wasn't working as well as it does now.

Hey, thanks for your work and for chiming in here! I will give it another shot.

How does Sublime Text compare to VScode for you? I am curious about the choice between the two, and why one would be better.

I can't Sublime in any way - and I say that having tried TextMate on OSX a decade or so back. Sublime just isn't VIM in so many different ways, it hurts. Neither is VSCode - but the varying tradeoffs are solidly worth it (IMHO).

I've also JetBeans'd (2001-2003) with varying success, and have been trying PyCharm on and off since 2014, just due to the promise. They're not there - or at least not enough.

JetBeans constant need to move my profiles around (literally they change per version) has made my strategy of having revision control sync things throughout a nightmare. Also, due to some files being binary - I just couldn't.

VSCode - and especially now that I have the global tasks plugin has simply blown my mind. Every (python django) repository I have has a wrapper script, as part of my tooling - I simply have vscode call that. Now, I have several commands I used to jump to a terminal for, run within code, in a collapsed terminal. It's great. My #1 use for that is a profiler and runserver. In dev, I always, always want them running.

It's much the same for other languages - and my environment.

I loved Sublime Text for years, but it gave me every impression of being dead on the vine. Since it's proprietary, there's not the option of forking it to add my own features and fixes. I personally find VSCode to be at least as good as ST in every way, and much better in many.

out of curiosity. Have you added features or fixes to VSCode?

Same here for me, but with Emacs. I've used it for decades and love it. One day I heard that VSCode had an MIT license, so I figured I'd see what all the fuss was about.

Wow. Everything actually "just worked". Python had perfect syntax highlighting out of the box. It noticed that I had pylint installed and started using it. It was trivially easy to set up per-workspace virtualenvs. Its git plugin certainly isn't the awesomeness that is Emacs's magit, but it's totally sufficient for normal day-to-day workflows.

It's now been a couple of months since I fired up Emacs at all, and now most of my coworkers have also switched to VSCode (yay for making it easy to share settings among coworkers within a project!). I am far, far from an MS fanboy, but they hit this one out of the park. Well done, team.

I've been thinking about installing VSCode for a year now, I've been happily using vi/vim since the '80s. Because of your message I finally installed it to try out. I've got a few projects I'm working on, can't wait to see how it works for Python. I'm an ops guy, so I don't write code often.

One thing I forsee being a problem is that one of my projects is a side project, that I usually work on from the couch at home, using my chromebook sshed into a box running vim. So, I can't run vscode in that environment. No biggie though, I can drop to vim for that.

Worth noting, it looks like there is an extension for opening an SSH FS remotely[0]. It's something I've been curious about and will probably explore further. Not sure about getting a more flushed out dev environment on your chromebook, I know it's an option and that VS Code works in Linux (use it under ubuntu/elementary).

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Kelvin.v...

This has been my experience too. I've been an exclusive Vim user (except for Java and Scala, for which I used IntelliJ with the excellent IdeaVim plugin) for over a decade. VS Code is the first editor where the benefit added outweighs the small losses brought by leaving my carefully manicured .vimrc.

There's one thing I wish I could figure out (I haven't really put that much work into it, so I'm sure there's a fix): is there a way to bind "<<" to "move text left without losing the current selection"?

Just out of curiosity, what are some of the tasks that you run in vscode ?

I've never found a real use for them, so I want to know what other people use them for.

I use them to convert markdown files to pdfs and open them. It can be as simple as the shell command `pandoc .md -o .pdf; open *.pdf`, and for more complicated documents, you can just write a makefile and have vscode use that.

Tmux + vim seems better suited for this task.

I have a bunch of docker wrappers for restarting various things. I have some GNU Make targets, flake8, ansible-playbook calls that I run, some django targets. Since I structure things similarly, I'm 100% okay with the idea that a specific command is useless in a specific project (i.e no make for X).

But the idea is that I can than wrap django's manage.py to collect just the commands we write, do something similar for make targets, and selected other things - so that I can just continue working and check on the task later.

In my mind, almost anything other than linting, debugging, profiling, and deploying shouldn't need to interrupt my flow.

Honestly, if you like VSCode you should have been using emacs rather than vim all along...

Honest question, how can I know if this type of comments are not something like paid advertising more than an honest review?

Most vim users chose it because they're borderline anti-IDEs, it's really strange to me that you chose to switch for features that a vim+tmux workflow already offers.