Don't use VSCode

Speaker: James Smith

Track: Other

Type: Talk

Room: Talk Room 1

Time: Oct 06 (Fri): 09:45

Duration: 0:45

Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform editor that has taken the programming world by storm: it's used by about 73% of respondents to a StackOverflow survey in 2023. And what's not to like? It's flexible, fast, very extensible and it's open source in addition to all of this!

Except ... when it's not. There are some technical down-sides to VSCode (especially if you don't have an expensive modern computer), and much of what makes VSCode exceptionally useful isn't actually open source and could be detrimental to the ecosystem as a whole.

I will spend some time in this talk going over the pros and cons of VSCode, its useful features for developers in general and Pythonistas in particular, and importantly the caveats, why I think that it's best avoided.

I will end with an impassioned plea to the local Python community to rely primarily on properly free (libre) software tools for the bulk of their development, I'll demonstrate some of the ones I use, and briefly mention a few other alternatives.

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[robbybankston]

Having used dozens of IDEs and editors over the last 30 years for dozen of languages, just use what you are personally most productive in. Of course what you are productive in today may not be what you are productive in tomorrow. Long live vi.

[whong]

This message brought to you by JetBrains

[greyfade]

>VSCode bad because it's not truly open
>recommends PyCharm

Ok, yeah, I'm going to disregard.

[Milan_Openfeint]

21:50 "my title was a little bit click-baity" yeah agree with that

[smittywerbenjj]

If you dont write a message when committing and hit the commit button, vscode will open a new tab that gives you plenty of space to write your commit message. That tab also has intellisense functionalities for git issues among other features.

[Tntpker]

I work as a data scientist/analyst and VSCode is by far the best editor to work with Jupyter Notebooks. Having Vim bindings just improves my efficiency even more.

[ChesterGingrich]

"If its written in Rust you MUST tell everyone its written in Rust"! 🤣🤣🤣

[Luke-mbrw]

What a dumb clickbait title. Is that the quality of decisions we should expect from this channel?

[kaostical]

Not having auto-completion is not a minor inconvenience.

[paulfrydlewicz]

So basically the arguments against vs code are it takes 300mb memory and it's "sometimes" (whatever that means) slower (compared to what?)..

If that is the argument against vs code than I see it at 90% market share soon. It's just too good.

[truthdeeds]

One of the least things I worry about is what IDE should I use.

[zeus]

VSCode is fine. Don't use Python.

[TonnyStaunsbrink]

Did I get that correctly? An argument against reliance on Vim plug-ins is, that they always "somebody's" project. Presented at a Python conference, Python which itself was once "somebody's" project.

[basicguy]

Not saying that VSCode is always the best, but your reasons are obviously related to special cases such as using Python. And the disk space argument is totally not a thing, you are not running the IDE on your washing machine or calculator. 300Mb is nothing on today's computers.

[Yaotzin]

"That commit message box is just.. stupid."

Tells everything about the speaker. Seriously, i like dabbling with vim (because i don't know how to exit from it, send help!) but we're not in the 80's anymore. IDE's make coding easier and faster for most developers and VSCode is one of the best ones even tho i still think a different one is better for me.

[rallokkcaz]

Did this man get frozen in time for 15 years and woke up 5 months ago? I feel like everything in this talk is common knowledge and any sane developer has probably already tried it at the very least. Maybe I'm a crusty old engineer at this point, but this is like 5 minutes of searching on google's worth of info.

[technowey]

That he even judges people based on the IDE they use makes me reject his views.
There’s can be legitimate arguments about what’s better, however, it’s the code they write that matters.
People learn tools, and then get used to them.
He also said, “It uses quite a bit of disk space as well.” However, if there are more features or better features, I’m fine with that. My primary development system has only multiple high speed SSDs that amount to 4TB of storage. I’m using a small fraction of that now.
And, in the end, he argues that because what he uses is harder than VSCode, it helps him get into a flow-state. I’ve never used VSCode, however, after reading that, I want to try it. I rarely have issues getting into a flow state, so easier sounds better.

[Luix]

Use vscode you are not a worse programmer. Discussing about IDEs is wasting time.

[donotreportmebro]

"Memory is not as expensive as it once was". Tell that to Apple.

[denysmiller]

Pycharm more non-free, than vscode. What he talking about? Pycharm cant open big file (3 or more mb), its using 6+ RAM in idle. Its crazy!!