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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

- Git - quite self-explanatory

- Visual Studio Code - I like more than the paid version (that I have a subscription for)

- SQL Server Management Studio execution plan modes - it is a gem that few people know about and even fewer can utilize it effectively to make 10 second queries run in 30 milliseconds.

- Composer (PHP) as my first encounter with package management, years ago.

- Notepad++ - the only mini-tool available in production

- Virtual machines and snapshots. Never fear again about ruining the work environment and helping a lot with having separate dev/stage/prod environments without breaking the bank. Also a way to split and separate my environments, the laptop is for emails, VM's for everything else.

PS. I am not a programmer, I am officially a manager and mostly an architect, but I write code to keep current

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There is a paid version of VS Code?

Maybe the person meant to say Visual Studio Code is preferable to Visual Studio.

I feel that Visual Studio Code (a free programmer's text editor) suffers from its poor branding -- it's too easily confused with Visual Studio (a paid IDE), so folks dismiss it out of hand because of the perception that it's not free or is only for MS languages like C# (neither is true). Microsoft should have called it something else.

As a Vim user of 2 decades, I have to confess something: VS Code is a far better programmer's editor than Vim. It's pretty responsive, has seamless (and better) integration with language servers [1] than Vim, has better autocomplete than Vim (due to said language server) and the Vim keybindings are not terrible.

For the first time, refactoring (renaming variables) is easy because the editor now understands the language-specific structure of the code as opposed to the code being treated as a long string. It's possible to attach a language server to Vim but it's fiddly and doesn't work that well.

[1] https://langserver.org/

I have no problems using LSPs for C/C++ (via clangs), rust (rust-analyzer), Python (pyls), JS/TypeScript, CSS, bash, and more in Vim (Well, NeoVim) with the autozimu language client.

The experience is a bit different in VS Code.

To me, in Vim it feels a little bit like one is calling an external program (which one is), and the monospaced text-only UI constrains what can be shown.

In VS Code, the experience is more integrated (because the GUI isn't constrained to a text interface), things update live, so you can preview the changes before applying.

I've tried both, both work but I find myself preferring the VS Code experience.

Visual Studio is paid. I don't qualify for the Community Edition, all other editions are paid.

Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are two completely different things.

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