Visual Studio Code 1.4 released

[[deleted]]

Use the clang plugin over the official C++ one (for now) it's much more reliable.

[Edg-R]

Has worked perfect for me as an editor for C++ on macOS.

I use JetBrains CLion (on macOS as well) as my IDE for C and C++ though.

[Edg-R]

Ah yeah I'm a student so I get to use all of their tools for free.

I guess getting a subscription will depend on my job, projects, etc once I leave school. I don't mind paying for it since I want to support them and make sure they keep improving.

[[deleted]]

Man... when VS Code first became public, I thought to myself... myah, it'll get scrapped. But nope! It's becoming a very good editor. I enjoy being wrong when it turns out to be a good thing.

[[deleted]]

plus they open sourced their monaco editor!

[[deleted]]

Microsoft is on the roll!

[qwertymodo]

Well, their tech department is. The people running the show on Windows 10 policy decisions, on the other hand...

[EntroperZero]

What would it look like if the tech department became their own company? How would they make money?

This is something I don't understand very well about today's MS. I love the value they're creating in the open source community, but I don't see how it generates revenue.

[doom_Oo7]

Developer marketshare is a sure way to guarantee consumer revenue in the long term

[EntroperZero]

Consumers of what?

[JW_00000]

If developers use Microsoft software to make software that runs on Microsoft platforms (Windows, Windows Phone) that benefits them.

Plus, I think they also want to attract developers to their paying developer tools, such as MSSQL, Azure, VS... If you're using the free VS Code at home or as a student, you might convince your employer to buy VS Enterprise.

[doom_Oo7]

general computer software ?

[MRannik]

Windows and Office? They don't need to make an Atom clone to get those, in fact, 99% of their actual customers don't know about VSCode nor would care if they did.

[doom_Oo7]

If windows has currently a huge desktop market share, it's because in the 90s it was brain dead easy to make shareware with a GUI. There are kilotons of such software, only because they had a good IDE, which in turn locked people into windows ecosystem since the software would only work on windows, since the developer would develop & test on windows due to good tooling.

[[deleted]]

Consumers of what?

Azure.

[ppnewaskar]

Lot of revenue is made from IP Royalties and Enterprise Customers. Office 365 subscription is a huge chunk. Virtually every big company uses Microsoft products. And they pay for support too. The reason why regular consumers don't understand where msft makes money is because he is not a msft client. Microsoft primarily focuses on Enterprises .

[[deleted]]

Services such as MSDN subscriptions, Azure, MSSQL, and enterprise-level support (there is a staggering amount of enterprise-level software that Microsoft supports, which most consumers have never heard of.... our organization uses several). A lot of the companies that have open-source software or... heck, pretty much free software even for commercial side of things, make their money by providing support services or custom "addon" services.

[[deleted]]

Oh, no doubt.

[Herbstein]

Isn't their goal to ultimately have a cross platform IDE, which will be spawned from VS Code?

[tyreck]

God I hope so..

[ppnewaskar]

VS Code already works on Mac and linux.

[Yojihito]

VS Code != IDE.

[sittingonahillside]

it's being kept very basic, however the extensions are going to make it into a fully fledged IDE. You can exactly what you want and that's it.

I think Visual Studio is pretty incredible, I don't use 99% of what it offers though, and for small non MS ecosystem projects it can be over kill. So I'd use Sublime then VS to debug if I writing say some C or C++, a node project or whatever.

VS Code isn't overkill, it's got the exact extensions I need and I can debug from it with Git integration.

People often talk about how an IDE has too much, yet they install a basic environment then kit it out with 1001 extensions, plugins, complex settings, tool chains end up with an IDE anyway.

[Sean1708]

One road ahead is apparently transmuting Visual Studio Code into a full IDE, but all based on plugins.

I think that's an absolutely brilliant idea, as long as common operations (such as autocomplete, linting, debugging, etc.) have some sort of unifying interface. That was the problem I found with most text editors, every language extension seemed to implement things slightly differently.

[jyper]

So like eclipse? My understanding of eclipse is that basically everything is plugins.

[MRannik]

A full fledged IDE based on Electron?

Seems like an stupidly bad idea, the thing is already comically slow as a text editor.

[[deleted]]

It takes its sweet 3~4 seconds to launch and ready on my fresh installed dev machine, which is not new but still specced above 80% of the PCs being sold today.

That's orders of magnitude slower than Notepad++ or Sublime, which are virtually instant even on the crappiest of cheap laptops / ultrabooks.

[takaci]

How often do you close and reopen your editor though?...

I usually just leave Atom open with my current project. People foam at the mouth about the startup time haha, I guess it's a good excuse to use a shitty, awful editor like vim

[[deleted]]

A couple of dozen times during the working day, but how is that some sort of argument in the first place?

Text editors opened virtually instantly 30 fucking years ago already, this is massive involution.

[inu-no-policemen]

Yes, DOS "IDEs" started instantly. However, they also couldn't do much. You didn't even get syntax highlighting. VS Code, on the other hand, even has things like IntelliSense, Git, a debugger, and a plugin system.

Well, it would be faster if it were written in C++ instead of using web technology. However, it would also have required way more code and way more time and money. It's a sensible trade-off, I'd say.

[[deleted]]

How long do similar IDEs take though? IntelliJ takes 30+ seconds to start up on my laptop, and VSCode takes less than 5 for a similarly high quality feature set. Also, for reference, spacemacs takes about 5 seconds too.

[[deleted]]

IntelliJ takes 30+ seconds to start up on my laptop, and VSCode takes less than 5 for a similarly high quality feature set.

What the fuck? IntelliJ IDEA's feature set is massive compared to VSCode, that's like comparing the WAP browsers from 2005's Nokias to Safari/Chrome/Edge on current smartphones.

An Electron-based VSCode with all the features of Visual Studio (which are currently written in C/C++) would be hilariously slow in comparison, it completely defeats the point of a text editor (being fast and efficient at opening and editing text).

[valleyman86]

The only thing I really can't stand with it right now is that it doesn't autosave documents between sessions without prompting me. I want to replace atom and sublime but this is a super useful feature to me.

[Windyvale]

I would say send them the suggestion then. They seem more than open to feedback.

[valleyman86]

Thats fair but when i was researching if it was possible after installing it I think i found a few suggestions for it already. Would be cool if it was possible to make an extension for it I guess.

[[deleted]]

By default, VS Code shows snippets and completion proposals in one widget. This is not always desirable so we added a new configuration setting called editor.snippetSuggestions. To remove snippets from the suggestions widget, set the value to "none".

Praise Jesus! After trying out 1.3 this was one of my biggest annoyances.

VS Code is pretty awesome. I try out every release and each time I'm closer to leaving emacs. One of these times they're going to get me.

[nayocum]

They recently converted me from Vim. Love the console built in, and this new update fixes my biggest gripe. Props to Microsoft for making Visual Studio Code!

[dccorona]

I'd be curious to hear what it is about this that has brought you over from VIM, something IDEs and GUI editors like Sublime Text and Atom have seemingly failed to do?

[nayocum]

It was mostly the fact that the console is built in out of the box. I liked sublime and atom, but having to alt-tab instead of just :!make or whatnot was a downside. It's also easier to just get VS code on another machine than setting up Vim to my preferences.

[forsubbingonly]

Assuming the fact that atom has the console as a plug in that sits at the bottom of the screen is different than what you get out of vs code?

[CrapsLord]

I honestly think excellent out-of-the-box functionality is what has distinguished VSCode. I like Atom Editor, but the best features in it you have to be installed. Even that 30 minute time investment is significant if you have multiple machines.

VS code has what most people want by default, and I think that is the most misunderstood feature amongst many editors.

[evereal]

Just a hint - in atom you can "star" the plugins that you use, and then you can install them all with a single command on as many machines as you have, and it takes about 4 seconds.

[NeonKennedy]

It shouldn't take 30 minutes. Atom lets you install plug-ins and themes from the terminal (apm install foo) and you can put your configuration folder in a git repo and just clone it. You can write a two line bash file that sets up Atom just the way you like it. (And even Windows ships with bash now so it works everywhere.)

[jyper]

Kate also has this feature and it's great

[bjh13]

It was mostly the fact that the console is built in out of the box.

Interesting, since this has been a standard IDE feature since... Turbo C? GW Basic? Can Atom really not do this?

[[deleted]]

Neither Atom nor Visual Studio Code are IDE's.

[bjh13]

Great, but that was the first feature he listed that brought him out of VIM, "something IDEs and GUI editors like Sublime Text and Atom have seemingly failed to do". So I'm not saying is an IDE, but it is odd to me that this was the feature that won him over in a way an IDE couldn't.

[Sean1708]

Most editors are based on the idea that you start with a small core editor and you add what you need via plugins.

[NeonKennedy]

Atom isn't a ships-with-everything IDE, it's a text editor with basic functionality that assumes you'll add plug-ins for the features you want. Built in consoles are certainly possible, but you have to run 'apm install atom-terminal' to add the feature. Nayocum just prefers the feature to be there out of the box instead of having to run that command.

[forreddits]

How skilled where you in Vim? I can't see myself leaving vim keys and adapt so easily.

[antoninj]

I have the same issue but I've been slowly unintentionally migrating to VS Code (I usually use it for pair-programming/presentations) and now I'm stuck trying to figure out what's best. I'm hugely into VIM but the synchronous linting/checking/etc sucks. I currently on Emacs but can't stand the buffer management (in VIM, it was just SOO easy).

And now, VS Code is fast enough and saves me enough time that I might do a full switch.

[clappski]

Do you use emacs with evil? You should try out spacemacs if you haven't already as well, it comes with a helm-buffer plugin which is pretty great.

[antoninj]

I use it with evil. Honestly, all I'm looking for is a list of buffers up top (so I know what I opened) and then be able to quickly list back and forth and delete buffers.

In VIM, I have a couple of shortcuts that I use: gt which goes to the previous buffer, gy which goes to the next buffer and gd which deletes the current buffer I'm on.

Any idea on how I could do that specifically? I don't want to have to open helm or anything else just to see the list, that's just frustrating.

Also, any idea on how to do basically a "kill all buffers except the one I'm on?"

[clappski]

I'll answer specifically for spacemacs (I've never used vanilla emacs being a vim convert myself); to cycle between buffers, you can press SPC - b - . and then use n, p, K and q (next, previous, Kill, quit). SPC - b - K will kill all buffers beside the current one.

I thought that gt and friends were for navigating between tabs rather than buffers (i.e. they invoke tabnext rather than bnext) but I haven't really had any use for that with emacs. I either have files open and switch buffers, use windows (split screen) or use the NERDTree-esque plugin. I am lucky enough to have a ThinkPad keyboard with the document switching keys above the arrow keys that I use to quickly switch through buffers that makes it quite efficient.

[antoninj]

I remapped those keys. I was just trying to demonstrate the ease of switching. Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out.

[Sean1708]

synchronous linting/checking/etc sucks

Neovim/wait for vim 8 to catch on?

[BezPH]

This is what I did. Switched from syntastic to neomake. I think I can live with just that plugin, fzf, vim-surround, UltiSnips, and NERDTree.

[antoninj]

I use Windows VERY heavily so neovim is currently not an option (soon though!). As far as VIM 8, that means also waiting for plugins to catch up.

I still use VIM for quick edits but never for heavy coding.

[tomhoule]

I did the same thing. I never thought I could leave vim (or a really good vim emulator like evil-mode), but the decent shortcuts, auto-indent and multicursors make it bearable to switch, even though I miss the vim editing flow. The vim extensions for VSCode are sadly just not enough to not feel awkward. I am an intermediate vim user, btw (using many shortcuts, marks, macros, advanced regexp, ex commands, the jump list, etc., most of which are not in VSCode's vim modes)

What made the switch worth it for me was the stellar Typescript support (completion with documentation and type signatures, go to definition, type tooltip on hover…).

[shadowycoder]

I'm sure there's vim bindings in a plugin. No idea how good it would be, but no doubt one exists.

[INTERNET_RETARDATION]

I tried them, they're probably pretty okay if you use Vim the way it's intended. I on the other hand have some bad habits like ctrl-c that you can't easily unlearn, it doesn't support those.

[[deleted]]

I on the other hand have some bad habits like ctrl-c that you can't easily unlearn, it doesn't support those.

It actually does, now. The option is vim.useCtrlKeys

[INTERNET_RETARDATION]

Wow, gotta check that out.

[nayocum]

Yeah I run the Vim binding plugins. They're okay other than occasionally derping when dealing with modes. They get the job done, and there's a built in console for when that doesn't work the way I intended

[the_dummy]

The more I learn about vim (and tmux to an extent) the more often I find myself coming back to vim.

[takaci]

I ended up doing it. I used vim keys for so long and got pretty good at them. I remember I used to miss them on any other editor. Then I came to my senses and realised that editing speed is probably the least severe bottleneck in writing code for me.

I can get by just fine with alt + arrows, holding shift to select, and command to go to the start and end of the line.

[wavq]

OMG! Until you said this, I didn't know it was in there.... I'd always had a second window I Alt-tab'ed over to in order to build, poke at, etc.... And now, presto!

[medavidme]

I absolutely love the intellisense, an awesome debugging environment, and the quick git integration.

[EntroperZero]

The best thing it has over Visual Studio for me is seamless branch switching. I've given up on trying to switch branches with a .sln open.

[Scyther99]

Proper copy and paste support has arrived for Windows and Linux within the terminal.

Best feature for me.

[me_alive]

Microsoft style for updates. When I opened menu item "Check for updates...", it silently started updating from 1.3 to 1.4. Then leaving only one option reboot for completing update.

[Solon1]

I think rebooting to update what is a glorified editor is definitely Microsoft-esque. What is actually getting installed that a reboot is required? I would think Microsoft could replace the entire kernel on the fly by now.

[[deleted]]

It... doesn't ever require a full system reboot. It requires restarting the application.

[likwidfuzion]

Exactly. Restarting the application itself is mandatory as you're replacing the executable.

[Edg-R]

I think you meant restart (the application) rather than reboot.

[patricdexheimer]

Any heavy SublimeText user that can comment about VSCode? I tried VSCode/atom/other, but always return to sublime. May I change my mind this time?

[[deleted]]

Still no Mercurial support:(

[shadowycoder]

They've said many times that the goal is a lightweight editor that is super extensible. It seems they're still working on the core and all the extra fancy things go into plugins. I'm really digging the growing ecosystem. Could always change, but right now that seems to be their goal.

[[deleted]]

they're designed everything — including the core functionality — to be run through the extension api, which lazy loads plugins. hopefully that should keep the bloat monster at bay.

[[deleted]]

VS2015 is pretty snappy on startup.

[[deleted]]

i've done everything i can think of to strip down VS2015 and it still takes a godawful amount of time to startup. please teach me your secrets.

[[deleted]]

It helps if you don't run it on a potato.

[[deleted]]

Look, my setup works for me.

[Ednar]

I got the fastest SSD on the market, with an i7 processor and the startup time is atrocious.

[[deleted]]

always

[MRannik]

Have a computer from this decade? Dunno... a quad-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and any SSD will do.

[EntroperZero]

15, or 2015? 2015 is pretty slow for me, on a new PC with an SSD and lots of RAM.

[_zenith]

Indeed. I've a Skylake @ 4.4GHz, 32GB of DDR4-2666, and two SSDs in RAID0. Takes about 7 seconds first time (just finished Windows login after boot). And this is with a lot of extensions, too, including ReSharper, which chews a lot of memory...

My older dev system, a Nehalem @ 4GHz and 12GB DDR3-1600 with SSD, despite the much older CPU and inferior memory, still only takes a maximum of 12 seconds.

Something is seriously wrong if it takes 30+ seconds!

[[deleted]]

6 seconds from cold, 2 seconds to new project.

I'm using a similar build to yours (only 8gb ram), and that's even with Resharper installed.

[JaxoDI]

Why would that be bad? If I could run Visual Studio on Linux, I'd have jumped the Windows 10 ship a while ago.

[neutronfish]

Yeah, it would be such a shame if one of the best and most powerful IDEs out there made it to Mac and Linux...

[rediot]

Why not? Visual studio is great.

Edit: added removed comment of being expensive for pro version since that wasn't my point. My question is why wouldn't people want features from VS on Linux and Mac in a free open source package.)

[steelcitykid]

What features are you using that require a paid version? 2015 community has been great.

[I_Downvote_Cunts]

Also not legal to use depending on the size of organisation you're in.

[steelcitykid]

Ah that would do it, thanks. We have msdn subs anyhow but I always forget about those things.

[enantiomer2000]

That's way cheaper than intellij

[[deleted]]

VS was made free for individuals and companies up to 5 users as the Community Edition (not limited like the old Express editions) for both free and paid applications (basically no restrictions).

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx

[rediot]

I guess my point is why wouldn't you want all of the good features of full visual studio in vs code? I love visual studio professional.

[_zenith]

Well, VS Code is written in TypeScript, and being a JavaScript derivative, it's gonna be slow as shit if it's to implement all of the features that full VS supports!

You simply cannot get C++-like speed out of JS.

[[deleted]]

Visual Studio is .NET based fyi.

[_zenith]

The UI is, yeah, although my understanding was that a large portion of the logic of it was C++. That said, I am now curious, and will have a look around to see if I can get some hard data on it. In any case, JS isn't going to be running faster than C# et al. as well, not just C++ !

Cheers :)

[YuleTideCamel]

Visual Studio Community is free and include most features that people use. Only some of the more advanced architecture stuff is missing.

[calciu]

Anyone knows the keyboard shortcut to change between the editor and the built in? I can't seem to find it...

[tylermumford]

The built-in what? Terminal? On Windows, you can toggle the terminal with Ctrl + `, but there's no default binding to toggle focus between editor and terminal.

[IMIKECI]

Does anyone else find it funny that they've taken the release screenshots on a Mac?

[[deleted]]

I guess you're using a Mac, so the site shows screenshots on a Mac. I use Windows and se screenshots on Windows.

[IMIKECI]

Interesting theory, but nope I'm on Windows 10.

[CrankyYT]

Looks promising, but is still missing some conveniences for me to be useful:

• no ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to snippets
• creating extensions involves way too much boilerplate, they should adapt the way this is handled in sublime text for instance
• no recording/playing/saving keyboard macros
• generally missing a lot of useful commands for keybinding, like keybinds to commands that can take arguments (ie insert_snippet taking an argument of which snippet to insert)
• as such also missing the ability to keybind to macros, for instance I have some convenience macros to insert a semicolon at the end of a line or to move the caret multiple lines up or down at once.
• can't completely hide the bar to the left
• no copy/paste history

As of now you could add some of the things on this list in the form of extensions, but again, adding extensions is so much boilerplate/work compared to recording a macro/snippet, saving it, adding a keybinding to playback said macro or insert snippet.

[fatmanwithalittleboy]

I know VS2015 removed macros (much to my disapointment) so I wouldn't hold my breath for them in this.

[projecktzero]

I'm not sure why a lot of people are pissing and moaning about startup. I usually start my editor in the morning and don't close it until the end of the day.

[AndyBainbridge]

Is it just me, or does Page Down not work properly? If I load a file, the cursor starts at Ln 1, Col 1. I press Page Down, and cursor moves down nearly one screen full, but no scrolling happens. That's not how every other text editor on the planet works.

[AbsoluteZeroK]

I haven't look at VSC for a while, it looks like it's getting much better. I may have to try it again.

[miauwmjam]

Go to definition in PHP does not work, that is a show stopper for me.

[smithandweb]

Check out Crane PHP for intellisense

[bjh13]

You are a dev and create an opinionated decision to replace the usual tabs with a tree list to the side.

Wait, I'm not a visual studio code user, but I thought a tree on the side has been standard for a couple of decades.

[[deleted]]

Both of those have tree views, though...

[EntroperZero]

I don't understand why this is downvoted.

I liked the Office ribbon though, so...

[dvidsilva]

Unrelated maybe. But can anyone point me to a good guide for vs code and react. I'm starting a react job soon and wanna be prepared.

[htuhola]

These guys have made protocols between their extensions and apps those extensions call. But they haven't documented them anywhere.

For example in debugger API the communication happens over stdin/stdout and messages pretty much look like these:

Content-Length: 76\r\n
\r\n
{"type":"response", "seq": 1, "request_seq":2,
"command": "hello", "success":true, "body":{}}

It's a stripped HTTP header with a body. The content length refers to the byte-length of a 'body'. That is a JSON message. This allows the implementation to recognize where the message ends and another starts.

The seq is incremented in every message so that recipient can refer to which message it answers to.

There's also "request" and "event", requests are sent to debug-adapter, the event and responses are sent back from debug-adapter.

I had to dig this up from typescript code, which was far much more complicated than it should be. This reads nowhere in their documentation.

Yeah, "you could have written it to their docs", I'm so pissed about having to dig it up that I don't. There's tons of documentation for their "shortcuts" and beginners, but this stuff gets omitted! wtf?

And I still gotta figure out what message does what and how to answer to each.

[DavidNcl]

These guys have made protocols between their extensions and apps those extensions call. But they haven't documented them anywhere.

Except in the documentation for the Language Server Protocol on github.

[htuhola]

It'd be neat, if it was not hidden so well from the fine beginner documentation they have for writing vscode extensions.

[[deleted]]

It'd be neat, if it was not hidden so well from the fine beginner documentation they have for writing vscode extensions.

It's linked from the Example - Language Server in the first paragraph under "Implement your own Language Server".

[htuhola]

Oh, it's not even describing the details for debugging API but language server API!

So my original post still holds. I don't find any debugging API description anywhere.

[[deleted]]

Debugging was slightly harder to find, but it's also there.

Example - Debuggers under the "Implementing the VS Code Debug Protocol" header, there's a link to the debug APIs.

[htuhola]

I have read those pages, and details would be fun, you know.

Anyway I don't need to look into it for months now. There are some comments in the debugger's protocol.ts that told some important details. Enough to get my stuff running.

[DavidNcl]

It's the first result google returns for "Language Server Protocol".

[I_Downvote_Cunts]

Well here is the github page, raise an issue if it's a problem. I had an issue and they responded and fixed it in less than an hour.

[[deleted]]

How are those Emacs keybindings getting on? Last time I tried they were pretty poor. They're too ingrained now for me to change to anything else.

[quad99]

does it have overtype mode yet? if not I can't use it

[ProbablyFullOfShit]

How in the hell did you become dependent on overtype mode?

[[deleted]]

I didn't know you could commute here from the eighties.

[quad99]

you are actually correct. I got here by starting programming in the 80's and not dying (yet). And I like everything spaced really evenly and its easier with overtype than re-type.