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Comment by strictfp | Hacker News Reader

I'm one! I work with VS daily and I think it's pretty bad. Some examples; I cannot get a plain folder view. Intellisense is very inept compared to Jetbrains products. Bad refactor support, can't find things you're looking for etc. File tabs are hard to keep organized. The source control support has been worst of the worst up util recently (blame view taking minutes to show up etc), and now it's only mediocre. Best way to find stuff is through "find all", which is an order of magnitude slower than grep. "Track changes" resets on file close, not when you save or commit, making it rather useless. VS also crashes quite frequently if you aren't gentle with keypresses. Single-threaded plugin model causing keyboard input lag. Etc etc. I could go on.

The good parts of VS is hot-reload (when it works), the debugger, and the profiler. Otherwise I'm not a fan.

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>I cannot get a plain folder view.

Like this?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jchv/files/main/devenv_G81...

Use the "Switch between solutions and available views" button and select "Folder view." Seems about right to me.

> Visual assist is very inept compared to Jetbrains products

Jetbrains does have better refactoring, but you don't really have to choose one or the other; Resharper and Resharper C++ give you the best of both worlds. Jetbrains is missing some stuff that Visual Studio can do, too. Visual Studio does some static analysis to detect out-of-bounds errors and other mistakes, which is useful to have as quick feedback in the IDE, in my opinion.

Sure, I'm aware and have ReSharper C++ plus the clang linting enabled.

VS isn't all too shabby, they've been shaping up recently. But it certainly isn't the best, or even among the better, in my opinion. Even the file editor is pretty weak compared to other editors IMO.

Have you used VS without major extensions like Resharper for a decent length of time?

I find Resharper slows everything down significantly and makes VS worse overall.

Yes, I have. And although Microsoft claim otherwise, I find intellisense sorely lacking in a lot of areas. Indexing is bad, search is bad, and their refactorings miss the mark a lot of the time. It's clear that Jetbrains lexical analysis is a lot better. I can search for implementers, find usages, rename and restructure without thinking twice, most of the time.

ReSharper has been really slow, yes, but it's also much better than intellisense and noticably better than Visual Assist. As of now, it's at least usable for me. Have to turn off full solution scanning, but other than that it works.

I agree that the general experience is degraded by ReSharper, sometimes severely, but VS is just too dumb without it, IMHO.

I've recently uninstalled Resharper, mostly due to slowness and frequent VS crashes. For refactoring I've found Roslynator to be a fairly good replacement. In the codebase I'm working on ice noticed the worse options for jumping to derived types, etc., but at least I know that codebase very well so I have other means of going where I need to. It's generally been more than offset by having a responsive IDE.

Code completion is over thing that previously caused me to reinstall, but Intellicode is good enough by now. That one also comes with one very nice feature that I've used a few times by now: turning manual code changes into refactorings. Once you start editing the same thing over and over it starts suggesting you too do the same as a refactoring. And so far it's been very good with detecting such pattern changes and changing them on its own.

Thanks for the tip! I had a look but Roslynator seems to be C# only, and I'm coding C++.

I actual like vs (but that is more inertia than anything). But that is one annoying thing about it. The features are usually there, but buried in some inscrutable way. It is one of the more robust IDEs out there. But you kind of have to do it the VS way or you will get mad at it.

There are hundreds of things the prog does. But literally have no icon to click on or short cut bound to them. You have to dig them out of the options and bind them or add them to a menu item to even get at them. Its been like that since the mid 90s.

FWIW I (a daily VS user and someone who is generally fond of it) don't particularly like the VS folder view. I find it slow to open and a bit clunky; accordingly I often have VS Code or a terminal or Explorer open in addition to VS.

Last time I had to use Visual Studio (about 10 years ago) I used emacs to write my C# code and used Visual Studio to manage the "project" and run builds. Mainly because I had 2 decades of Emacs muscle memory and I kept fighting it in VS (yes, I tried the emacs keybindings in VS).

>I cannot get a plain folder view

Yes you can. Change from solution view to folder view.

>The good parts of VS is hot-reload (when it works), the debugger, and the profiler

So everything you want from an IDE?

What are you actually angry at?

I can't use file view, since it has some side-effect that messes up our solution completely. And before you blame me, it's a cmake import.

I'm not angry, I just don't think it's fair to claim that VS is a good IDE.

If that's all you expect from an IDE, I understand why you're happy with VS :D

Yes, but what do YOU expect from an ideal IDE? That was the question.

If you're targeting .NET or C++ development for Windows, there's not a lot of competition to be able to claim that there's something substantially better. Rider, IMO, is on par, with better refactoring. However, VS debugger is still better.

You're right in that it might be the only viable option for some usecases, but that doesn't make it good. It makes it passable :)

To add to this list: if something happens on disk it practically has an aneurysm. VSCode and JetBrains products cope without even blinking.

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