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Why I Love Visual Studio Code

Authors

I've been using Visual Studio Code for nearly 2 years now. It's really a beautiful piece of software.

Life Before Visual Studio Code

Prior to Visual Studio Code I was using Atom Editor. Before Atom, I was using Sublime Text. The transition between these 3 editors over the years has been seamless, as they all pretty much share the same keyboard bindings and each have a plugin ecosystem allowing you to customize the editor. What prompted me to move to Visual Studio Code was it speed, ease of use, its rapid release cycles and powerful community support.

In fact, I love using Visual Studio Code so much that I created 2 open source editor plugins for it.

What I Love About VSCode

  • very fast and lightweight feeling application
  • it offers a hybrid text editing experience. For example, you can use it as a barebones text editor or you can use it like an IDE by downloading a plugin for the language of your choice.
  • it's available across all major operating systems like Mac, Windows and Linux. This is a big win for me because I often do switch between Mac and Linux at work.
  • it offers live share code editing, so you can collaborate on code with others, similar to how you would use Google Docs
  • the plugin ecosystem is amazing! There are so many plugins that can enhance your editor's experience.
  • creating extensions is great experience. Plugins are written in javaScript, the documentation is great and the debugging and developer experience for testing and writing plugins is top notch.
  • it's an open source application with strong backing from the web community; it's constantly being updated every single day with a major release every month.

The Future of VSCode

I envision a bright future for VSCode. From my observations, with Microsoft's backing, the VSCode team is well positioned into making this one of the most amazing and versatile editors around. Naturally, given that VSCode is a very active open source project, it's only going to keep improving everyday, compared to closed source products.

Sublime &Atom Editor Packages - I Need to Create or Still Port

For my visual studio code experience to be complete, there are few packages from my old text editors (Sublime / Atom) that I still need to port.

Sublime Text Packages I Need to Create or Help Port:

  • Bracket Matcher
    • I have a general idea of how to implement this already, however I need to talk with the creator of the Sublime packages to come up with a strategy to build a generalized API for supporting dozens of programming languages.

References and Resources