Vscode is essential just because of what they call “intellisense”. You download the package for the programming language you want and then it shows you lists of variables and members in classes, shows you tool tips with relevant comments and some autocomplete suggestions. This is so invaluable and saves so much time. I can’t just remember the entire codebase and every function, variable and overload of it myself. Switching tabs and windows all the time every time I forgot the overloads for that one function is an impossible waste of time when I’m doing anything complicated.
I know there are actually FOSS ways to do this now finally but I’ve never successfully set it up. Hopefully that stuff will be working well, easier to use and more refined by the time Microsoft pulls the plug in Vscode for Linux.
There have always been other solutions though. Someone here mentioned eclipse as a FOSS solution, but there are others. Even vim and kate have pretty good language comprehension thanks to working with language servers. Likewise products like JetBrains while they can be expensive are very good pieces of software. I actually don’t even use VSCode that often anymore thanks to Kate and the JetBrains suite. VSCode itself is open source and you can use one of the pure open source builds, or any of the other programmers text editors that exist.
Vscode is essential just because of what they call “intellisense”. You download the package for the programming language you want and then it shows you lists of variables and members in classes, shows you tool tips with relevant comments and some autocomplete suggestions. This is so invaluable and saves so much time. I can’t just remember the entire codebase and every function, variable and overload of it myself. Switching tabs and windows all the time every time I forgot the overloads for that one function is an impossible waste of time when I’m doing anything complicated.
I know there are actually FOSS ways to do this now finally but I’ve never successfully set it up. Hopefully that stuff will be working well, easier to use and more refined by the time Microsoft pulls the plug in Vscode for Linux.
There have always been other solutions though. Someone here mentioned eclipse as a FOSS solution, but there are others. Even vim and kate have pretty good language comprehension thanks to working with language servers. Likewise products like JetBrains while they can be expensive are very good pieces of software. I actually don’t even use VSCode that often anymore thanks to Kate and the JetBrains suite. VSCode itself is open source and you can use one of the pure open source builds, or any of the other programmers text editors that exist.
Ahem. Eclipse would like a word.
Was doing Java, C, PHP, and Python on it close to 20 years ago. With language API support & documentation implemented by plugins.
That said, I do tip my hat to MS for developing LSP for vscode - and eventually making it an open standard.