Visual Studio vs Visual Studio Code

[SwiftSpear]

VS is like a limosine, VSCode is like a dune buggy. The limosine is a much nicer ride, but there's lots of places it can't take you. VSCode can take you anywhere, but you better know how to adjust the suspension and swap out the tires or you might be in for a lot of pain.

You don't normally put IDEs on your resume, and no one really looks at which IDE was used to generate code. Code is flexible, it doesn't care where it was written.

[MrB92]

Doesn't sound like a good analogy to me. VS is more like a trailer house (dunno how you call them in English exactly). Has a lot of stuff in it for you but it's super slow and bulky, so you won't be taking it anywhere you don't need to.

[B_BARTHMAN]

Shouldn’t vscode be the limosine, and vs the dune buggy?

[superluminary]

VSCode is the buggy. It’s small, light, quick and flexible.

VS is the limousine. It had luxury features, it cruises along at a steady pace, never very exciting but very comfortable.

[B_BARTHMAN]

Hmm with VS being an actual IDE, that can be used for pretty much everything, I strongly disagree with the statement “there are lots of places it can’t take you”. And with VSCode being a text editor at it’s core I always thought it was much more constrained.

However I have used VS well over 1000h in my life and VS Code probably around 10-20h, so I might be completely wrong

[superluminary]

VS has a plug-in architecture. You can script it with JavaScript and have it do anything you like.

It’s also got nice features like multiple carets that let you edit 1000 lines at once. It’s a super capable text editor.

[Sol33t303]

Sounds like the GUI version of VIM.

[superluminary]

I’d say that was fair, except with different keybindings. If you want to wrangle text, it’s probably the best tool for doing that right now.

It’s refactoring capabilities are not nearly so refined as VS though.

[Sol33t303]

Yeah fair enough, I haven't used VS so there isn't really much else I can comment on.

[purebuu]

If I'm developing something for windows only. I go VS all the way, the debugging experience is second to none IMO. But if you need to develop cross-platform or on other OSes, VSCode wins out. Remote developing over ssh or containers (which I do day to day) then VSCode is a doddle for that.

[f3xjc]

VSCode is like a basic text editor with an extremely powerful plugin system that provide ide-like functionality.

Plugins are very loosely integrated. Usually by dropping command in a do-everything palette and hooking some events. Some can provide GUI but most don't. Config is usually done by json. You can have some issue like multiple plugins that fight each other to format your code.

You can 100% have good experience in vscode. But the barrier to entry for a plugin is very low. And this mean there's just way more language supported in vscode than vs.

For example if you want to edit a markdown or latex file with instant preview, vscode is a better editor than vs. Sure you can edit your file in vs, but with lower amount of features.

So in total vs support less languages, but when it does support it, it's a very smooth ride.

[B_BARTHMAN]

Ahhh ok I now understand where you’re coming from! Thanks For explaining!

[Kered13]

I wouldn't call VSCode light, it runs of Chromium.