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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the GitHub Codespaces personal beta: counterintuitively, the UI/UX of Codespaces is as performant as VS Code on the desktop.

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I also don't use VS Code usually. My personal preference is a JetBrains IDE, but my point is more engineers should be able to choose the environment they're most productive in.

Jetbrains has a hosted-IDE pilot project: https://lp.jetbrains.com/projector/

Currently, VS Code is the primary method of connection to each Codespace, and we do not support other editors officially.

If you’re looking to connect via SSH, we do have a workaround here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/blob/main... -- and I use this regularly for Jupyter Notebooks.

That looks cumbersome enough to sound like you guys are trying to discourage the method entirely. A custom password that has to be copied and pasted every time? A lot fewer people will put up with that for long enough, and I'm sure whoever came up with that and whoever approved it, they all know this.

How is the performance on jetbrain IDE. I love webstorm & intellij but they are Soo slow compared to vscode for me.

At first I liked them because they have lots of great functionalities out of the box, but vscode has caught up and just yesterday I switched back to vscode from jetbrains. For java spring and react

> How is the performance on jetbrain IDE. I love webstorm & intellij but they are Soo slow compared to vscode for me.

It's pretty configurable. In my experience, it's pretty quick. It's not text editor or VS Code quick but the only thing that ever trips me up is the occasional re-indexing. Well worth it for how well it does everything else.

Doesn't VS Code essentially run in a browser anyway?

Yes, with special Electron shenanigans that still work in a normal browser well I suppose. The web UI has a few features that make it more device agnostic too (e.g. a hamburger menu to replace the File menu. Yes, you can run Codespaces on an iPad.)

Code server (https://github.com/cdr/code-server) works in a similar way using your own PC as a host, but for whatever reason Codespaces is more performant.

That's not counter intuitive at all: Desktop VS Code is a web app running in chromium.

To be clear, the UI is a web app. But that is serviced by out-of-proc servers written in many different languages (e.g. language servers are usually written in the same language that they service).

In some sense, that's exactly the same as normal web-browsing:

Parts of gmail run in the browser, the rest runs on servers written in many different languages at Google.

To my mind that's more of an indictment of VS Code than a recommendation for Codespaces.

unless you've used it, then you'd know that its browser backing is nothing to frown at since its a great piece of software that works great.

Isn’t VS Code Electron based? Same diff at that point

Same regarding the code executed, but not same in that various actions require a round trip to a remote server with attendant latency.

Yes. Though there are a lot of techniques to hide latency.

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