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Having used both VSCode and IntelliJ in anger - VSCode is nice, but the refactoring and other features in IntelliJ blow it out of the water (IMHO).

And for test passes, debugging, code coverage analysis, performance testing results analysis, etc.

> I think the author doesn't know what VSCode can deliver.

Here's refactoring and code inspection in IDEA [1], [2]. VSCode is just that: a code editor with some features tacked on.

> “Analysis and refactoring and everything” isn't something VSCode overlooked developers interest in

This is somenthing most VSCode developers (and emacs and vi developers, too) aren't even aware exists.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/refactoring-source-code....

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/list-of-java-inspections...

IntelliJ definitely wins for large-scale refactors... but for everything else it feels sluggish next to VSCode in my experience.

For projects built in a microservices architecture, these massive refactors are becoming less and less common from what I'm seeing. Usually if you want to change a method/class/library used by multiple different modules, it'll be a breaking change and most likely better handled by depending on a semver-versioned import anyway.

> “Analysis and refactoring and everything” isn't something VSCode overlooked developers interest in, and application server integrations are also part of the VSCode ecosystem.

I have yet to see vscode perform one third of the refactoring options provided by e.g. qtcreator for c++

The Java/ Kotlin editing experience on VS Code is pretty bare-bones. Unacceptably bare bones IMHO. But each tot their own.

Although, I'd be probably be pretty harsh reviewing any PRs where because of the lousy tooling the code is full of unaddressed warnings, misorganized imports, or where the author can't be bothered to refactor because they lack the tools.

The reality is that on most projects you can use whatever you want as long as it does the job, properly. VS Code is mostly not very practical on such projects for Java projects because standards tend to be pretty high because of the tooling.

VS Code is still valid of course for those who only occasionally need to do any changes. I tend to use it for things like javascript/typescript and rust or other things I use less frequently. I switched to pycharm for python though because it seems marginally better at supporting that.

Honestly I think you're misleading and haven't actually used the tool.

The Java experience in VSCode is quite acceptable, it is the Eclipse language server after all. The warnings and inspections are on par with intellij most of the time, but your devs should be using sonarlint/cube which provide far superior inspections on either platform.

As for organized imports in my experience Intellij just organizes them into one giant list alphabetically while the language server does the same except it's organized by JDK imports, javax.* imports, third party imports, and finally in project imports.

> As for organized imports in my experience Intellij just organizes them into one giant list alphabetically

That's just a configuration, you can absolutely define import groups in IntelliJ

If the Eclipse language server is anything like using Eclipse, I would not call it acceptable. The difference between Intellij and Eclipse is night and day in so many areas.

>I think the author doesn't know what VSCode can deliver.

Can it Inline Variables yet?

Yes it surely can. Just right click on the variable and pick "Refactor..."

And you'll find other refactoring options as well, e.g. rename, extract...

At least for JavaScript, it seems like it still doesn't support Inline Variable. I can Extract Variable, but not Inline. Of course, that's a different matter than whether it's supported for Java. Last time I tried using the Java extensions for a non-trivial Spring Boot project, it was intolerably slow. I managed to convince a coworker to switch to IntelliJ after he saw the difference between my setup with IntelliJ and his with VS Code.