283: The State of IDEs: VSCode or BS-Code?

1 Like

Like Jill said: “It’s a good thing we have … emacs … heeheehee …”. :grin:

3 Likes

Sounds like @dasgeek needs to do a 30 day vim challenge!

1 Like

After listening to the episode I was wondering, is there a difference between an IDE and a text editor? My understanding of an IDE, is an application where you can edit and run the code from within that application Wikipedia definition.

Am I misunderstanding the intent of the podcast?

1 Like

Alright I was listening to this episode and was a little upset about vim being misrepresented. Maybe everyone is unaware of this but you can get neovim to look not only prettier than vscode but have the exact same functionality and more. I’m talking git integration syntax highlighting suggestions Anything and I mean anything you can do in vscode you can in neovim name one thing. Now setting it all up by yourself is pretty daunting but people have set up ones already premade where you just clone the dot files from a GH repo like chris@machine on YouTube. You are doing yourself a disservice by not looking into this. Check out “code smell” on YouTubes setup and tutorials or Chris@Machine please! I can even run rust-analyzer from a function like you can in vscode check it out!!!

Cloning ChrisAtTheMachine’s build is a completely different animal to actually using it as awesome as it is.

I think the big difference is copying vscodium’s features in *vim means stepping well outside of official support and while you’re supposed to do that, you’re still having to develop features yourself and/or inherit all the quirks of a ton of personal projects which’ll usually (though not always) have a sole maintainer who may or may not be active, may or may not care 1/2 a whit about repo security, have zero if not near-zero documentation spread out all over the place and have a limited pool of people who can help you if you get stuck with that particular part of your build.

I now use micro (no plugins) and a ton of bash though that’s after ~2 years of beating my way into near-exclusive use of vim (which was near identical to neovim for my purposes) until I just got fed up of constantly having to futz with it and educating my way into obscurity. If someone takes to it and values freedom i’d say *vim all the way and I think everyone should learn basic vi but in my opinion it’s not the simple alternative it’s often billed as and it’s asking for a heap of work you wouldn’t otherwise have.

1 Like

I love vim and I use it, I never had the need to use anything else, but my use case is and always was pretty basic. Though I would rather recommend to learn vim or even neovim (never tried that one) and adapt or incorporate it into your personal workflow instead of just copying the dot files from the web by somebody else.

2 Likes

Doom Emacs to satisfy all actors involved? :wink:

Typewriter → scanner → tesseract

2 Likes

I think the more powerful the features and editor can incorporate, the more it becomes like an integrated development environment. For example if it can be used to edit files, browse directories, open files and run shell commands (such as compilers, interpreters or build systems) without leaving the editor, it’s arguably an IDE at that stage.

Thanks, everyone! I’m glad emacs was mentioned as it’s the first editor I used, on Unix, back in the mid 90s. I didn’t really use it as an IDE although I guess I could have done. Then coding using MS tools on Windows, Visual Studio Pro was the IDE I used (and I think VSCode is a lighter-weight relative of this).

When I started using Java, it was NetBeans or Eclipse, both open source, the latter I am surprised was not mentioned at all in this episode. It was very popular some time back, and basically was an attempt to break MS monopolising IDEs, as far as I understood it.

As NetBeans was Sun’s then Oracle’s official IDE for Java, I tended to prefer it. I still prefer Apache NetBeans now, when coding Java. If I’m coding in C or C++, depending on the platform, I’d probably use Eclipse for generic work, or a more specific IDE such as QtCreator or alternative for Gtk / Windows. For Android it would be AndroidStudio.

For Ruby and JavaScript I tend to use VSCode or VSCodium.

For quick basic text edits I’ll prefer vim or for basic edits on larger files Kate or gedit. KDevelop is also something I’ve dabbled in though it does feel a little dated now.

As you can see, I tend to alter my tools according to needs.