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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of using sharp tools…. I really don’t get the love for VSCode.

I’ve used Jetbrains for years and last week gave VSCode a really solid try.

Man what a mess. Everything is a plug-in, plug-ins are inconsistent, getting basic things to work requires a tsunami of plugins. Everything feels half baked and duplicated and needing updates or abandoned ugh.

Nothing feels professional because everything is a plug-in built by random person X or y or maybe some plugins are professional I don’t know.

And even when I’d plugged in as much stuff as I could find it still couldn’t do basic things like find and import node modules.

I abandoned the experiment and gladly went back to JetBrains where the tools are sharp, available and well organised.

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Jetbrains tooling is amazing. But can you attach to a running Docker container and develop inside it using Jetbrains?

Because last I checked I couldn't and was a blocker for my team.

With VSCode I can attach to both local and remote environments using Remote Development plugin by Microsoft (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...).

Yes most things are plugins. But they are high quality and maintained by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Docker, Shopify, Vue team, etc.

I like Docker development containers because they contain all the tools and configuration, down to the precise dependency and tooling versions.

Not only is the onboarding easier but we get less surprises by small differences in environments.

What do you mean “develop inside it”?

Here’s a link on doing it with python

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/using-docker-as-a-rem...

Note that this feature is only available in the Professional (that is, paid) version. And since VS Code can do it for free, it has the upper hand in money-tight environments.

If you can't afford to pay for an IDE then your employer should get out of software development.

That's a hard fact.

Any organisation that can pay a salary or a contract rate, pay for a computer for the person to work on, pay for the hosting of their service, well they can also afford to pay for the tools that the developers need to do their job. And if they really can't, as I say, they should stop doing development because they are deeply unserious.

> If you can't afford to pay for an IDE then your employer should get out of software development.

That's my most workplaces. After cut-throat technical recruitment process with complexity and data structures smartasses, I thought they must be great workplaces with the best tools. Then on the first day in the office "IDE?! no we have no budget for it, why don't you write code in the new message window of outlook?"

Developers clearly don't need Jetbrains in order to work. Millions and millions work every day without it.

Yes but they’re so nice to use. It’s the integrated part that matters. The collection of tools just play well together.

That's just the python interpreter inside Docker being called from outside Docker. That's basically a configuration to call:

docker exec -i container_name python3 myfile.py

What VSCode does is much more powerful. It's as if you opened VSCode from inside the container. It works because VSCode installs a server inside the container so the world is now your container and you get full isolation, precise tooling and other goodies.

In my case the development Docker file has all dependencies devs need to work on the project. No need to fight with versions of npm, node, Python, Java, Go, nginx, Caddy, yada yada. Everything is configured in the Docker file. Everyone on the team gets a copy of the exact same environment.

We could even attach to a remote container running somewhere in "the cloud" if we wanted to.

I believe that IntelliJ can do this for remote servers. It installs an IntelliJ agent on the server and it’s like remote development, your real IDE becomes a lightweight client of it.

This?

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/remote-development-a.htm...

JetBrains Gateway is a lightweight launcher that connects a remote server with your local machine, downloads necessary components on the backend, and opens your project in JetBrains Client.

That requires SSH daemon running inside Docker.

Plus it looks broken from the comments on https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455

> Peter commented 21 Feb 2023 11:23

> Remote development is my biggest JB disappointment. After years of development, it still doesn't work -- is too slow, buggy, crashes all the time, with most features just missing. Seems like they can't do it.

Last comment is from 16 May when they just closed the issue (and other related issues) with the same message.

In VSCode these things just work. And it needs no SSH to attach to a Docker container.

This is fair for certain languages like JS or Java (IntelliJ is amazing), but not as much for less popular languages. I started learning Rust a few years ago, where the Rust plugin for Jetbrains IDEs was still in its infancy. Switching to VSCode specifically for rust-analyzer was a great decision for me, due to the amount of tooling included.

VSCode is popular because it is easy to learn for a beginner and shares much of the language server tooling with Vim and other popular editors. If you write a language server, it can work across multiple editors like VSCode and Neovim. (Though not Jetbrains IDEs, as far as I'm aware.) Writing a plugin for Jetbrains will only work for Jetbrains, so there's less incentive.

While Jetbrains have more powerful IDEs for specific languages, its less popular when VSCode, Vim, Helix, etc. all work together.

JetBrains released an LSP integration for their IDEs sometime ago: https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-d... Yes, it’s still new and somewhat buggy, but I am using Zig LSP plugin and it works pretty good.

Interesting! I stopped using Jetbrains IDEs by that time, which is why I didn’t mention it.

i tried Goland (the Jetbrains IDE for Go) and when my mouse hovers over a variable the IDE does not provide a tool tip that tells me what its type is.

And for that reason I've stuck with VS Code.

This is simply not true. I have been using Goland since the first beta and can remember this feature being in there and using since then.

100%. I'd be using jetbrains stuff right now if I wasn't experiencing weird inexplicable issues with Rider in the .netcore stack. Legit the first real issues I've had with their stuff in over 10 years.

As a 2+ year user of Vs Code for daily dev work - yes, this is accurate. Code is a lot like Linux: lightweight, fast, and a royal pain to set up.

But once it is set up with a cocktail of plugins it is rock solid. It is also much faster than any other IDE I have used.

However I am a weird user - I don’t usually use buttons on the ide. I just pop open a terminal for things like git commands, build commands, test commands, etc.

It still astounds me that people actually use "lightweight" and "fast" to describe vscode these days. How times change.

Compared to the competition. I don’t use VI or EMacs. I compare code to Visual Studio Pro 2022 or any Jetbrains product.

It feels lightweight and snappy when opening and loading a new project, opening individual files, and searching through a repo.

I will say though that Jetbrains Idea and Rider are getting much better, but vscode is free whereas those are quite expensive. So if I can get 90% of the functionality for 100% less cost, I will do it.

I second GP. My point of comparison isn't just Emacs, but also Visual Studio 2015 and 2017, as used for C++. The editor in VS feels snappy, in this general and hard to pinpoint way that lets you easily tell apart a native app from an Electron one. Conversely, despite being reasonably performant (for modern standards), it still feels a little heavy.

I don't know what it is exactly, but I know I'm very sensitive to it. That's the main reason I rarely use VS Code, despite being more feature-packed than VC++ (or, along a few dimensions, even my Emacs) - extra features are nice, but not worth the ongoing discomfort I'd feel with every single key press.

My current hypothesis is that VS Code (and JetBrains IDEs too, so it's not strictly an Electron thing) tends to do too much stuff asynchronously at the same time, making execution times of most actions highly variable and potentially unreliable. The variability usually isn't huge in absolute terms - it's just big enough to be annoying.

I used Emacs for about two decades. It worked well and did exactly what I wanted it to.

Then I started using Copilot+VSCode while learning a for me new language (Python) this spring. I've grown rather fond of VSCode since, to be honest.

This extension by Yuichiro Tachibana is the one to use to get Emacs keybindings, btw:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...

I almost went to vscode for copilot, but then I found out emacs can run copilot too. It works great.

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