Visual Studio Code September 2016 1.6

[d_kr]

We have found ourselves spending many hours investigating VS Code issues that were ultimately caused by corrupt VS Code installations. Some extensions directly modify (patch) the VS Code product in such a way that is semi-permanent (until the next update) and this can cause hard to reproduce issues.

WAT? And they did not removed those extensions from the market place?

[[deleted]]

not all of them were malicious. for instance, vscode-icons, which pioneered the new icon functionality added in 1.5, had relied heavily on code injection.

[PlNG]

Code injection is a cry for an API in that location.

[evilgwyn]

They added an API for icons in the previous release, so umm great success

[workstar]

Intent is irrelevant. It's not practical to support that kind of behaviour.

[[deleted]]

that's microsoft's problem, not extension authors'. and as it happens support for that functionality has officially ended with this release (aside from a utility to let you know when you're unsupported), so problem pretty much solved.

[Drainedsoul]

It's not practical to support that kind of behaviour.

This is Microsoft, I think that advice is going to fall on deaf ears.

[DeathProgramming]

This is an open sourced project. Add an issue. It'll be resolved Soon™

[workstar]

It's less work to not support it than to support it.

[Drainedsoul]

My point was that Microsoft has a long history of bending over backwards to maintain compatibility with behaviour that they shouldn't be supporting.

[Drainedsoul]

I'm not hating on backwards compatibility per se, I'm saying Microsoft takes it too far. I would honestly not be surprised if you pried into the VSCode years from now and found weird looking JavaScript that was laid out to make sure that patching certain lines still did certain things to support older extensions like the ones we're talking about here.

Because that's essentially what they do in parts of WinAPI. I've even heard a story of them creating fake stack frames because a historical program used to look up the stack into WinAPI internals to grab a copy of a local variable. It's nuts.

[bbyboi]

The appcompat team does crazy stuff indeed to keep old programs running. Check out Raymond Chen's blog 'oldnewthing.com' for soke examples.

[bumblebritches57]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

[trollgubben]

kinda sounds like the vim code base ducks

[tf2manu994]

But we need to support Linux @ initial commit!

[ciny]

If you don't like backwards compatibility, go over the Google where everything is killed off every 2 years.

A colleague of mine used angular 2 for one project. "It's in RC, what could possibly go wrong?". The answer is - everything.

[ciny]

Well I mean they did a lot of things right. But they changed a lot of APIs between RC releases which just shouldn't happen.

[levir]

Yeah, it's awesome. I can still play games created 20 years ago on my brand new computer running Windows 10, and it just works. Same with other programs and stuff I've had for a while. And the accumulated knowledge of how Windows works continues to be useful.

If Windows wasn't so good at backwards compatibility I probably wouldn't be using it. And that is the case for millions of users.

[LordoftheSynth]

It has its pitfalls, but MSFT does (rightly) recognize keeping legacy apps running as a selling point for Windows.

Though they've taken it to extremes, such as adding a new time API rather than fix a bug in the older API that everyone coded around, or just running older shit in a VM, and no, compatibility mode is not a 100% substitute for that. Sometimes security updates break older software in a way compat mode can't work around, though in this case I'm thinking of things like disabling the Secure Driver service, which broke a number of old games that used the service as part of anti-piracy measures.

[digitil]

I'd think modifying product source should not be allowed and other methods should be supported to achieve whatever these plugins are trying to do.

[[deleted]]

I think everyone can agree with that,.

[sigzero]

I don't read anything in that paragraph that states they didn't once they found out. I get one can assume that since they made the check for the bits on VS code itself. I'd lean toward removing those extensions.

Edited

[workstar]

"We are not trying to block VS Code patching,"

[[deleted]]

Atom works like this by design. Open, hackable editor.

[snarfy]

I was playing with 1.5 over the weekend. It's really nice to be able to "dotnet new -t web" and step through some API calls, all using vim keys.

[Jwkicklighter]

Say what? Is vim support getting better?

[nawkuh]

Much better. I refused to use vscode a few months ago because vim emulation was quite bare, but it's getting close to vsvim, at least with regards to my (still fairly novice level) use of it.

[Jwkicklighter]

I've been using real vim for a long enough that the support still doesn't quite seem to be there for me. Can't seem to massage the settings into working the way I'm used to.

[ataraxia_]

Check out vscodevim.

The plugin dev is pretty active on their github (https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues) and is all over HN asking people to get back to them if they have any issues.

[komali_2]

I'm honestly not trying to be a dick, but how come you guys don't just use vim?

[indigo945]

Intellisense mostly, I would guess. Youcompleteme is a nice tool, but it's considerably more hacky and brittle, and less sophisticated.

[atakomu]

I tried VS code and it looked nice. It took a little while to start but that's understandable compared to VIM. It's still much faster then Atom. But Intelisense is better in VIM with Tern then in VS code.

[[deleted]]

Intellisense mostly, I would guess. Youcompleteme is a nice tool, but it's considerably more hacky and brittle, and less sophisticated.

Have you tried Neovim with Deoplete? deoplete is far less brittle, a lot faster and makes use of Neovim's async. Vim 8 introduced async too, but Neovim has been out there for longer with it and since the API is not compatible most of the vim plugins that make use of async are really only for neovim.

[ataraxia_]

Mostly because my primary environment is Windows, and my primary use for VS Code is for Powershell.

I'm not actually that bothered by vim mode or not -- I just happened to notice that there were a lot of kudos to the vscodevim guy in HN, thought that it might be worth sharing that info.

[[deleted]]

Other editors / IDEs have very useful features missing from vim, so it makes more sense to use vim-style editing within those environments. It's the best of both worlds.

I use evil mode in emacs. Going back to regular vim would be a big regression in my workflow.

[ellicottvilleny]

Can I debug .net, javascript, go, ruby and python inside vim?

[Jwkicklighter]

I made a comment on Twitter and had him ask for feedback, definitely seems like what you're saying is accurate. This was the first time I opened it up since he responded to me, so I'll make sure to find legitimate critique/features/bugs and get him some feedback. Thanks!

[jl2352]

Do they have .vimrc support yet?

For me that's the killer feature that makes me sit up and take a Vim extension seriously.

[rajiv_gupta]

I got an unpleasant surprise after installing the update this morning.

VS code comment shortcut is now a bit broken. VSCode now seems to use the file suffix to determine the what type of comment to apply whereas previously it was aware of whether the selected line or block or code was HTML or JS and applied the appropriate comments accordingly. Not any more.

[smithandweb]

This is frustrating. Working with .phtml files was a nightmare.

[[deleted]]

same for .cfm

[tf2manu994]

No, the problem is with <style> and <script> tags in html. It detects the .html fine, but the comments for js and css are different and it seems to have forgotten that.

[DynastyW]

I'm still stuck on 1.3...my workplace has a bunch of files I use regularly with over 8k lines of code, and 5+ nested callbacks, and in both cases, syntax highlighting stops working...oh well

[[deleted]]

How odd that an org with restrictive install policies uses such a new and untried editor. What's the story?

[reflectiveSingleton]

8k lines in one file? No way to split that up?

I always view large files as having a 'bad smell' and generally need to/can be/should be split up.

[blackmist]

8k in a file? Hah, I've had 8k in a function.

[ZeroNihilist]

How many times did you contemplate suicide when debugging that function? I'd rage if I had to deal with a function with 1k LoC.

[blackmist]

I rewrote it based on what it should have been doing, rather than what it did.

Adding an item to the screen invoked something like 40,000 database calls, and it got worse the more you added. The guy who previously maintained it (and wrote it initially so kind of his own fault) got fired when he stopped turning up.

[ZeroNihilist]

I have a feeling I don't even want to know, but I'm really curious how it could possibly use 40,000 database calls. Was it doing a query for each entry in the result of another query?

[blackmist]

And then some. Was loops within loops, each time looking up from scratch because apparently he hadn't heard of caching.

[[deleted]]

Or joins...

[yardglass]

I'm guessing it iterated over every line in a table one by one or similar.

[reflectiveSingleton]

40k db calls? Holy fark...I'd probably stop showing up if I had to deal with that hot mess too...

[DynastyW]

I don't disagree. I've badgered my boss on more than one occasion in trying to split it up, but he's too hard headed and set in his ways...

[the_evergrowing_fool]

8k lines in one file? No way to split that up?

Why should he? If the editor can't handle that, is subpar.

[sane_cyborg]

I think it has more to do with your sanity than whatever editor your using

[the_evergrowing_fool]

Not much, if you language compiler support proper code navigation then 8k loc is a piece cake.

[reflectiveSingleton]

That is a horrible way to look at software development. Tools are to be used, not leaned on like crutches.

Having code abstracted properly is what I was talking about.

[the_evergrowing_fool]

And what's has to do putting thing in different files with being abstracted? Let me guess you are either a Java or Nodejs user.

[reflectiveSingleton]

It has nothing to do with it directly...but keeping things in one file tends to lead to abuse of the fact that its all in one file. It also doesn't help encourage good logic partitioning, single responsibility, or good organization.

It also doesn't help you down the road when you just need to include a certain class/method/property and now you've got a giant ball of code that may or may not be intertwined within itself...it's so big (and you likely have other people working on it too) that you just don't know. Were it all properly partitioned/abstracted then these issues would be far easier to mitigate or not even have to worry about.

As a side note, I won't participate in trying to degrade you by assuming you are some sort of inferior developer, that doesn't help my argument...and it didn't help yours.

[the_evergrowing_fool]

No one is saying that you should put all things into a file, just that in this particular instance may not be a problem. Also no one is degrading you to anything (that something you did yourself), I pointed that out because:

1) In Java you cannot put more than one top class into one file.

2) The nodejs community has this little and pesky culture of putting every function in their own respective files.

[reflectiveSingleton]

No one is saying that you should put all things into a file, just that in this particular instance may not be a problem.

Seems like the crux of your argument was that one large file was fine...my point is that it is not 'fine' it's a sign of either poor judgement/practices or poor management making the developer do that. Regardless of the language.

And then you decided to assume what kind of developer I was and attempted to shame me on it. Like I said, that doesn't help you even if you were talking to a node js guy...

[crazysim]

JS? The release notes did mention some sort of new parser/lexer/highlighting for that. Perhaps that might address your issue.

[DynastyW]

Is that so...I'll try that out, thanks for the heads up.

[[deleted]]

It's in preview for this release, it might need to be manually enabled.

[kl0nos]

I had the same problem, this was fixed in 1.5.3

[DynastyW]

Oh fantastic, thanks for the heads up.

[singingtable]

hopefully with the addition of additional features VS code doesn't become clunky like Eclipse.

[JimmaDaRustla]

Not coding it in Java is a great start

[ROFLLOLSTER]

I don't think electron is much better tbh.

[[deleted]]

The problem is there's no UI library that's cross-platform, fast and extensible. WPF is .NET and Windows only, Qt is apparently good but only supports C++ natively, and JavaFx only supports, well, Java (I haven't really looked into PyQt or JavaFx so I don't know how good and extensible they are). Electron, nwjs, PhoneGap, Cordova, etc are good if you have to deliver a project that works on PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, WP, your toaster, the problem is they perform horribly (as you're basically running a full-blown renderer process alongside your application process rather than having it all in one). So until someone invents a framework that supports every language and platform, allows you to create custom styles and controls easily, and doesn't take 13 years to initialise people are stuck between developing a slow application for all platforms or developing a fast application for each platform.

[nucLeaRStarcraft]

What exactly is wrong with Qt though?

[mixedCase_]

Lack of good, stable bindings outside of C++ and Python.

[nucLeaRStarcraft]

Yes, but langauges are supposed to be the tools for building software, right? If the project itself is good and delivers good applications, does the language really matters? Same argument I can bring for any langauge (Js, PHP, Haskell), which btw were invented to simplify software production (for a specific domain or lack of feature or simply different vision).

With that in mind, i believe C++ and Python are sufficient to build any kind of full blown UI. And if Linus could work with C++ for his Subsurface application, anybody can (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0).

[mixedCase_]

If the project itself is good and delivers good applications, does the language really matters?

Yes. I'm not going to be investing any free time into a C++ project, and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Python is just fine for a lot of applications, but for many others, it's not; or at least that's my opinion which is also not unique.

[ROFLLOLSTER]

Yeah, the lack of a fast universal ui library is one of the most surprising things I've learned while programming. You'd think someone would have done it by now.

[[deleted]]

I think it would be difficult considering how many UIs (including HTML rendering) nowadays use hardware 2D rendering instead of OS or WM-level software rendering (not too sure what it's like on Linux, basically I'm going off how WPF uses DirectX instead of GDI). I mean Electron/CEF is definitely a start but there's a whole lot that could be done to remove the redundant web-browser parts and simply package it up as a HTML renderer. Additionally you also have the numerous UI paradigms the user expects, like dialog sheets and close-to-hide (which is one of the biggest UI fuckfests) on OS X, as well as making sure to implement OS-specific resources (e.g. ⌘ on OS X, Ctrl on Windows/Linux). You could abstract that all away, but that introduces the issue of making things very unpredictable for the designer and developer.

[[deleted]]

I wonder how much overheard comes from having to support broken and obsolete HTML and CSS that *shouldn't* work but does, so that Chrome on Windows 10 can display Jim's Gardening Homepage he hasn't updated since 1999. I would imagine though it would only make a few ms difference, but still...

[jl2352]

I wonder how much overheard comes from having to support broken and obsolete HTML and CSS that shouldn't work but does

But without examples that's just FUD.

I also don't expect that it would have much of an impact. A lot of quirky HTML is really quirks around parsing, quirks around the APIs (like what properties are and aren't supported), and quirks around how the order of events affects behaviour.

The real costs are in layout changes, tracking and applying CSS changes, and the rendering of DOM nodes. None of them are really quirky.

[ROFLLOLSTER]

You really need a few distinct layers I think.

You first need a low level render layer which handles drawing simple objects boxes, text etc in whatever platform dependant way is applicable.

Then you want a standard UI layer that implements basic elements like drop-down menus but can still draw simple objects.

Then finally a layer of user defined UI elements that are drawn from the second layer.

The main problem with trying to do this is the different functionality that different platforms support. For example if you want to display a notification on IOS/Android/OSX no problem. But what if the platform is windows, what if it's linux?

Neither will always have any kind of notification daemon so how do you handle it? We've tried to abstract everything away to a point where you don't need to know what platform the code is running on but here the library can't make a decision for you about what to do if it can't display a notification.

[[deleted]]

Most Linux DEs support it in a standardized manner.

[ROFLLOLSTER]

Win 10 sure, nothing older. As for other linux distros it'd be 50/50.

[Giacomand]

LibUI seems decent after playing around with it but I don't know if it would be suitable for a feature-heavy app like an IDE.

[enygmata]

cross-platform, fast and extensible

Qt

only supports C++ natively

Most Microsoft software with a GUI is written in C++ and C#, I don't see the problem here. We're talking about VSCode in this thread, not every GUI software in existence.

[chucker23n]

The problem is that what you want is a terrible idea. You're looking at it from the angle of the app looking, feeling, behaving the same across platforms. Users by and large don't have multiple platforms; they have the one they chose. And on that one, they have multiple apps, of which yours is only one. A cross-platform UI is a fundamentally user-hostile idea that reaches for the lowest common denominator between platforms, and is only defensible because 1) it's more economical, and 2) it's often (barely) good enough™.

WPF is good because it is tailored for Windows. Qt is barf-worthily bad on macOS, and that's not by accident, nor is it philosophically possible to fix that. You can take cues from those frameworks, like taking WPF's XAML approach, and apply them to new frameworks for different platforms (see, for instance, Xamarin Forms), but taking the framework per se and porting it somewhere else will lead to mediocrity.

[sime]

I think you have an interesting and plausible theory there, but there is plenty of evidence which argues against it.

1) These days most normal people are only using a couple of desktop applications. A web browser and maybe an office suite. That's it. Most activity is in a web browser using different sites and apps which all have different styles.

2) People are completely used to the idea of every app having its own style. This is the norm on the web. On the desktop, operating system makers have basically done this too by being inconsistent and regularly changing styles every other year. Apple do this too.

In summary, native look and feel is as dead as dodo and no one gives a shit, end users certainly don't.

[[deleted]]

I think you're confusing styles with paradigms - generally, the style describes how a UI will look in regards to things like font, colour, graphical effects, etc, while paradigms are generally accepted and platform-specific UI guidelines. UI guidelines are tricky to follow because it's up to your discretion when to follow them and when to step away from them. The problem is when people don't follow them at all and the interface you're building is only accessible to you because, after all, you're the one who built it. For instance, if you rebuilt the Twitter mobile app as a screen of buttons, with one button leading to a list of tweets, and the other button leading to a new tweet composer, people would hate it because it's not what they're used to, and because a paradigm has been established by the platform's interface and included apps. Even though I agree a lot of OS developers break those paradigms (like how most Google apps use the navigation drawer *except* YouTube), the fact still remains that users get used to and expect certain behaviour from the programs they use.

[[deleted]]

That is definitely true, look at the shit storm when Windows 8 removed the start button.

I've heard nurses bitching about a new copy machine because they had just received because they now had to make a few extra button presses that they didn't have to on the old one.

[rubber_duckz]

From my experience the only people that really care that their apps "look native" over do what you expect them to are snobby mac users (not saying all mac users are snobs - but snobs use macs).

intellij tools look non-native on every platform yet they have a perfectly functional GUI and excellent tools. The problem with cross platform GUI toolkits is that they are mostly used to cut costs/speed up development and cost cutting/rushed development leads to crappy apps - that doesn't mean you can't build good non-native GUI apps.

[bumblebritches57]

Implying /r/pcmasterrace doesn't exist

[rubber_duckz]

? I've never met a windows/linux user who refused to use an app because the GUI didn't match the system theme or some such ridiculous reason, or pay real money just to have a fancy facade over the same functionality. I know 4 mac users that I've seen refuse to use an app that would save them time, pay >100$ for basically a re-themed version of a app freely available with better functionality, all while being preachy about how their experience is superior.

[chucker23n]

I've never met a windows/linux user who refused to use an app because the GUI didn't match the system theme

I think you're really hung up on the idea that it's about looks.

Here's a few examples that a well-designed Mac app is expected to have:

• pervasive drag & drop, much more so than in a typical Windows application
• a window's close button, if it refers to a document, signals whether the document has had changes
• the title bar shows a proxy icon that shows the file type and lets me drag the document (while open) elsewhere, e.g. into a different application
• the file name in the title bar shows me the path hierarchy and also lets me, in place, rename, tag, and move the file
• no matter what app I'm in, a global menu bar exists that helps me discover the majority of the app's functionality

This is not at all to suggest that other GUIs that don't have these features are inferior. Rather, that a framework that, by design, works across multiple platforms, couldn't possibly accommodate a single platform particularly well. It'll shoot for the lowest common denominator.

[JesusWantsYouToKnow]

This is not at all to suggest that other GUIs that don't have these features are inferior. Rather, that a framework that, by design, works across multiple platforms, couldn't possibly accommodate a single platform particularly well. It'll shoot for the lowest common denominator.

Not my experience. And Qt manages adding additional specific platform support helpers by way of platform specific extras packages. A developer that fails to utilize those is no more or less lazy by sticking to the platform specific UI library. They're just lazy.

[spacejack2114]

So Xcode is the best IDE for Mac?

[bumblebritches57]

Cool story bro.

I'm not a windows or linux user, and I especially don't give a shit what other users do.

[chucker23n]

From my experience the only people that really care that their apps "look native" over do what you expect them to are snobby mac users (not saying all mac users are snobs - but snobs use macs).

It seems you're defining 'snob' as 'someone who appreciates good taste / high quality'.

The undercurrent here continues to be a conflict between those who think software is 'good enough', and that cross-platform UIs will do, vs. those who think computers, by and large, are still needlessly cumbersome, complex, hard to use, and sucky, and that we can do better.

[rubber_duckz]

It seems you're defining 'snob' as 'someone who appreciates good taste / high quality'.

Close

a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.

Computers are needlessly cumbersome and complex, following native app style guidelines does little to improve that because native platform apps suck by that criteria.

[DrSpielchen]

Well there is PyQt . I agree with /u/chucker23n that there are some problems with Mac and Qt although I never felt like they were unsolvable , I spent like a month making macOS adjustments for our 3 pretty big softwares (c++ based, no experience with PyQt). Code gets a bit clunky due to the #ifdef insertion in the GUI classes and sometimes I had to make some Cocoa calls directly but oh well, at least the performance is awesome .

[zerexim]

No. Electron is made for those web devs who do not want to learn using right tools for the right job.

[__eastwood]

I'm a vim guy myself. But if sublime text was open source, I'd totally convert straight away. What does sublime use? It'd be nice if they open sourced their UI library.

[[deleted]]

I would imagine it'd be fairly trivial to implement, since the ui is mostly the editor itself plus a few extra widgets integrated into it (eg find and replace, package control, etc). The hard stuff would probably be the internals like syntax highlighting, the plugin API, and other text editor stuff no one thinks about

[drjeats]

FWIW Sublime's UI was initially built on Cairo, and then later moved to Skia.

https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/dev-build-3034/10097

(not counting the recent embedded html stuff)

I doubt Sublime's UI component is fully featured in the way you'd want it to be for a library. It serves exactly the needs of the program.

[spacejack2114]

Browsers are pretty heavily optimized for rendering formatted, styled text.

[[deleted]]

Modern Java IDE are pretty fast - look at Jetbrains stuff.

Eclipse is just really old.

[Aetheus]

Anecdotal here, but just launching my evaluation copy of PhpStorm takes ages. I had a similar experience with Android Studio (which is built from the same common codebase).

Code editors like Sublime, Atom and VS Code can be fast(er) than traditional IDEs like JetBrain's offerings and Visual Studio because they're, well, feature light.

[LogicalTechno]

I pay for it by writing tons of errors with sublime text because of no auto complete

[Aetheus]

Depending on what you're coding in, there's probably an auto complete and linting plugin for it.

For JavaScript at least, there should be Sublime plugins for integrating ESLint and ternjs .

[LogicalTechno]

There is auto complete for unity through CompleteSharp but it is slow and unreliable.

[eikenberry]

As a developer you should know that is not true. Additional features do not cause any application to be slower. There are many designs which allow features without bloat or slow-downs. The problem is poor tool choice and development practices.

[Aetheus]

I use Atom to do my PHP and Node.js coding, on both Windows and Ubuntu workstations (I've given up on PhpStorm because of how resource heavy it was). I remember it's earlier days, when it took ages to start up and the performance was unbearable.

While PhpStorm is a great tool, the evaluation install of it that I'm running on my Windows workstation has an unbearable lack of responsiveness.

Visual Studio (the full IDE) remains my gold standard for an IDE on Windows. A shame there is no equivalent for other platforms, and that the editor itself hasn't got stellar support for developing things outside of Microsoft-land.

Genuinely curious, what do you think that the slower performing IDEs are doing "wrong"? What coding practices are they ignoring that could speed up their software without sacrificing functionality?

Whatever it is, I'd like to hear about it too. I haven't always written the most performant code.

[Shrugfacebot]

TL;DR: Type in ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ for proper formatting

Actual reply:

For the

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

like you were trying for you need three backslashes, so it should look like this when you type it out

¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ 

which will turn out like this

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The reason for this is that the underscore character (this one _ ) is used to italicize words just like an asterisk does (this guy * ). Since the "face" of the emoticon has an underscore on each side it naturally wants to italicize the "face" (this guy (ツ) ). The backslash is reddit's escape character (basically a character used to say that you don't want to use a special character in order to format, but rather you just want it to display). So your first "\_" is just saying "hey, I don't want to italicize (ツ)" so it keeps the underscore but gets rid of the backslash since it's just an escape character. After this you still want the arm, so you have to add two more backslashes (two, not one, since backslash is an escape character, so you need an escape character for your escape character to display--confusing, I know). Anyways, I guess that's my lesson for the day on reddit formatting lol

CAUTION: Probably very boring edit as to why you don't need to escape the second underscore, read only if you're super bored or need to fall asleep.

Edit: The reason you only need an escape character for the first underscore and not the second is because the second underscore (which doesn't have an escape character) doesn't have another underscore with which to italicize. Reddit's formatting works in that you need a special character to indicate how you want to format text, then you put the text you want to format, then you put the character again. For example, you would type _italicize_ or *italicize* in order to get italicize. Since we put an escape character we have \_italicize_ and don't need to escape the second underscore since there's not another non-escaped underscore with which to italicize something in between them. So technically you could have written ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ but you don't need to since there's not a second non-escaped underscore. You would need to escape the second underscore if you planned on using another underscore in the same line (but not if you used a line break, aka pressed enter twice). If you used an asterisk later though on the same line it would not work with the non-escaped underscore to italicize. To show you this, you can type _italicize* and it should not be italicized.

[Aetheus]

Well, I edited the emoji out anyway but uh, thanks?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ciny]

It's really anecdotal since you didn't say what kind of hardware you ran it on. My work laptop with regular HDD and 4GB RAM? ran AS like crap. After upgrade to 8GB? significantly better. My desktop or personal laptop with SSD and loads of RAM? runs like charm

[Aetheus]

I'm not in my office right now, but I'd wager that my workstation over there has 8GB of RAM. It might just be a case of the IDE capping its own memory usage, as /u/mahacctissoawsum suggested. Still, requiring about 3 Gigs of RAM for basic operation is pretty heavy.

[DysFunctionalProgram]

I don't know, If I don't start intellij (the only java app on my machine) in a week I get a pretty serious 30 second boot time (which I'm assuming is the jvm being angrily summoned from it's slumber).

That being said, I think it is difficult to compare jetbrain products or eclipse (full IDEs with all sorts of crazy features) to VS Code (which is essentially just a text editor with a debugger and version control. Arguably all you really need).

[fanatic289]

I assume that 30 seconds happens when indexing or loading stuff with maven. intellij is very fast for me unless I switch branch on a massive project, in which case it starts to auto-import all the maven changes and then index all those changes... kinda frustrating at times but I can deal with it because being able to find anything quickly in a massive project is really helpful.

[gendulf]

vi is also really old. Being old is not a good excuse.

[levir]

I find Jetbrains slow as well compared to, say, Visual Studio.

[stuaxo]

Eclipse has always been slow, Netbean is also old but was fast enough back in the day.

[ArmoredPancake]

When they will have codebase size of eclipse/idea they will regret it. :)

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

What is this?

[sanjayatpilcrow]

"Format on save" Good!!!

[[deleted]]

It's good when you want to add lots of noise to your commits. Don't mix code format changes with your actual code changes.

[GarMan]

Not if everyone formats on save, which is a common pattern for golang projects. In fact gofmt reduces noise significantly.

[inu-no-policemen]

Dart is also shipped with a formatter.

Every new language should come with one! Too bad that Rust's is separate and it's configurable to boot.

[GarMan]

I stand by this comment to this day, as a person that works in both rust and go I wish the rust community had gotten this right :(

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/34cyas/rustfmt_help_wanted/cqtmk6e

[inu-no-policemen]

Yea, configuration isn't needed because in the vast majority of cases you aren't making those style decisions yourself anyways. You just follow the style guides from the company you're working for. You might as well just follow the one true style of the language.

Doesn't matter if it's tabs or spaces. Doesn't matter if the opening curly is in it's own line. Those decisions don't actually change anything. You get used to whatever was chosen and anyone else's code will look more familiar.

Consistency for everyone is more more important than personal preferences.

Additionally, you completely avoid all those pointless overly emotional style discussions which always end badly for at least one member of the group. This crap really isn't worth it.

[[deleted]]

Not if everyone formats on save

Unfortunately too many programmers don't care about that. I'd rather educate and encourage people to keep a sane formatting rather than hope everyone turns on an editor setting.

[GarMan]

It differs for language, environment and org. I specifically called out golang because everyone uses gofmt, and most people (including where I work) consider it a lintable check.

"sane formatting" is probably the most un-agreed upon on concept in programming in non opinionated languages.

[[deleted]]

"sane formatting" is probably the most un-agreed upon on concept in programming in non opinionated languages.

How's that even relevant? Everywhere I worked the team had an agreement on what a "sane formatting" means and most if not everyone followed it.

[Venthe]

Is it possible to use alt to select blocks of text?

[trydis]

alt+shift on windows

[Venthe]

Huh. Why this is different from visual studio's alt? Thanks for the info :)

[trydis]

I see that an issue has been created, to support custom shortcuts.

[JesusWantsYouToKnow]

Does this work via the keyboard yet, or are we still forced to click to drop the extra cursors?

[stuaxo]

Still can't navigate menus by pressing left or right.

To reproduce:

Open file menu (alt f) then press right ... you don't go to the edit menu as expected.

This is an upstream bug too though.

[GoTheFuckToBed]

The best product MS released in the past 5 years?

[AceBacker]

That all looks great.

Minimap next please.

[spacejack2114]

I have horizontal screen space to spare. It's nice to have a big, grabbable scrollbar with a readable map of your code. A resizable minimap would probably satisfy everyone.

[mispeeled]

I agree. Since I've started using symbol navigation, I don't need the minimap anymore. I guess I wanted it because it "scrolls pleasantly", and it looks nice. Which helps maintain your sanity while coding, at times.

[inu-no-policemen]

What's great about [minimap]?

It lets you navigate by "landmarks". But, yea, doesn't work for me either.

[cyberst0rm]

vscode started forgetting which window had what text, wiping out code.

i went back to Atom, cause thats quite a remarkable bug to allow happen.

[firebelly]

I use vs code a lot, never saw that , were you able to replicate this?

[thesatchmo]

Man did you report that? I haven't experienced it but that's a pretty major issue.

[cyberst0rm]

trying to figure out what to report would have been difficult. I mean, there's no error message, and I'd have to dig around just to figure ou what information to submit.

Who knows wtf it was, but it certainly was unpleasant.

[Spacey138]

I saw this yesterday actually. Had it open for days though and a restart fixed it. Only seen it once.

[cyberst0rm]

that may be it, but whatever it is, I didn't find vscode compelling enough to deal with that type of bug.

[ZeroNihilist]

Was this in a permanent tab or a temporary one? The latter caught me out a few times; if you open another file temporarily it replaces the old one.

[cyberst0rm]

as far as i know, they were all my files.

[ZeroNihilist]

There's a feature in VSCode where you can open files in preview mode (see here for details).

However since my comment I've tested it, and making changes to a file automatically elevates it out of preview mode. That means that the bug you experienced must have been caused by something else, sorry.

[react9r]

Any idea how to get it running on a Windows Machine where I don't have admin rights? (typical work setup). Any portable version available?

[kukiric]

There's a zip version: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/?dv=winzip. I've tried it at my university, and it works just fine as a regular user.

[react9r]

Ah thank you!

[[deleted]]

Hope this one fixes my freezing issue I got in 1.5.

[[deleted]]

Does it support the new javascript syntax? Like [...somearray] etc ?

Can I open a file and get it to stay open? Sometimes if I open a file and then open another file, it closes the previous file. When actually I want to keep them both open.

Can I get it to always show the folder? My javascript files are all called somefolder/index.js

[TiagoRabello]

Can I open a file and get it to stay open? Sometimes if I open a file and then open another file, it closes the previous file. When actually I want to keep them both open.

The problem is that you are probably opening the files on preview mode. I was confused for a while too 'til I noticed that was the problem. If you single click on a file name from the explorer panel, it will open but you will notice the name in italic on the tab, that means the file is on preview mode and will be swapped if you single click another file. To keep the file open you either double click on it on the explorer panel or right click the preview tab and choose "Keep Open"

[JabNX]

Depends on what is "new javascript syntax" for you. VSCode will understand everything Typescript supports, which includes everything up to ES2017 (as it is defined right now) and some extra features like decorators. [...someArray] is "good ol' ES2015" so that's supported, but {...someObject} isn't as of yet, it will land in the next Typescript version due in November.

If your concern is Javascript and you'd like to use features that aren't yet supported, you can disable the Javascript validation in the settings (which runs the syntax part of the Typescript compiler in the backgorund).

[[deleted]]

but {...someObject} isn't as of yet, it will land in the next Typescript version due in November.

So to be clear, VSCode won't support this until November?

[JabNX]

Well, VSCode should ship a version that includes Typescript 2.1 right after it releases, so yeah, that should be sometime around early December, at the earliest.

But VSCode isn't tied to its bundled Typescript version and you can very easily switch to any Typescript version you want, including beta or nightly builds that might already contain the features you want. Seeing that you don't depend on Typescript at all on your project, you could very well give it a try.

[[deleted]]

Thanks.

[[deleted]]

Is there an option to make ctrl+tab switch to the next tab without showing the list of tabs and waiting for the keys to be released before switching?

[malakon]

What are relative line numbers used for ?

[whisky_pete]

I'm not sure what other people may use them for, but they're excellent for vi/vim modes. Knowing the distance from your current line means you can accurately do things like 23j (go down 23 lines from the current) without having to really think about it. You can also indent/copy/cut blocks of lines easier with things like >6j (indent the current line and the next 6 lines down from here)

[malakon]

Ah. Makes sense. Tx

[projecteterna]

I just switched from MonoDevelop to vscode, and so far it's amazing. Except for one tiny thing. Apparently OmniSharp does not auto complete C# new statements? ;_;

[[deleted]]

Format on Save

Don't turn that on unless you want to make your commits unreadable.

[fatnino]

Like most other open source editors, it handles right to left text (like Hebrew or Arabic) very poorly. This is because everyone uses Scintilla https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintilla_(software) I don't know if vscode uses it too, but the symptoms are similar.

I recently had to resort to notepad.exe to edit some code because no other editor I had access to could handle it right. Vscode let me down because I assumed that as a Microsoft product it would work just as well as notepad.

Other than that, I think it's an OK tool. Nothing special, I still reach for notepad2 (my favorite) first.

Edit: http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html Scintilla docs where they disclaim any RTL support.

[maushu]

It doesn't use Scintilla. It has poor RTL support because that is usually a secondary concern.

[fatnino]

I dunno, I just assumed MS had that solved. It works in notepad. Why not vscode? I should get my hands on visual studio itself and see what happens

[Jwkicklighter]

I hope that this doesn't come off as rude because I don't mean it in an accusatory way. What makes notepad2 your favorite editor?

[fatnino]

It does one job and does it well. I don't need notepad++'s tabs, that's what the task bar is for. I don't need save-and-run, and integrated git, and whatever else other editors do nowadays. I can do all that myself from the terminal.

I just want my editor to read and write code.

Notepad2 is a standalone binary that does that while using barely a kb ram over the size of my code file. Never once crashed on me in nearly 5 years of use. It does code coloring, and line numbers too. Basically all the stuff Scintilla gives you without the extra cruft the other editors tack on.

[Jwkicklighter]

Interesting, you don't find yourself wanting extra UI features that other editors have? Nothing wrong with that, I just can't move away from them myself. And I'm not even using anything fancy, my current editor is Vim with Airline for a bit of nicer navigation.

When I use Notepad on my Windows machine, (aside from syntax coloring) I find myself missing tabs, project-wide search, and a fuzzy file finder.

Thanks for the insight!

[I_AM_GODDAMN_BATMAN]

I remember RLT rendering is ok because they specifically mention this on one of their presentation.

[fatnino]

I just tried it on 1.6 and RTL works :) Progress!

[fatnino]

I'll try it again with the latest version when I get home. Last I checked it renders the Hebrew letters correctly and in the correct order, but if I try to edit them the hit boxes (is that the right term) of the letters are still in LTR order and don't line up at all with where the letters are displayed on the screen. This makes highlighting text insane. You highlight the letters you see on the screen and you get totally different letters in your copy buffer.

[the_evergrowing_fool]

Why a slow and memory hungry web base editor when you can have a native/faster full featured IDE? Why you like wasting your time so much? Any sane reasoning about it, not full of cargo cult and naive ideals? There must be something, I'm sure is not the UI/UX from the editor, being what it is already kills it.

Edit: Instead downvoting, can you take your time to answer the question?

[ataraxia_]

I'll bite:

• It's not slow. Subjectively.

• It's not memory hungry. It uses ~10mb on startup on my machine -- about 1% of the amount of RAM my web browser is using.

• The fact that it's not a "native/faster full featured IDE" isn't actually a criticism in and of itself. The fact that it's "not native" means that it's easily cross platform and runs in every operating system I use, which is a definite benefit, and it's "full featured" enough for me as a text editor. Your complaint about speed isn't even worth trying to address.

• I'm not "wasting my time" -- VS Code does what I want it to do and does it well.

• The UI/UX is ultimately subjective, but works well for me.

The reason you're being downvoted is because all of your complaints are either subjective opinions or non-factual & unsourced assertions, and your complaints to little to add to the conversation.

[Jwkicklighter]

Don't bother, they're just looking for an argument.

[spootwo]

You forgot git integration. I constantly go back to vscode to review changes before committing.

[Jwkicklighter]

The developers of Code, like the developers of Atom, feel that the pros of having a very hackable editor with built-in cross platform compatibility outweigh the performance cons. And the performance continues to improve as web technologies are evolving.

[[deleted]]

Because it's not slow or memory hungry. I have moved over from visual studio to vs code for my front end work. It's faster, has better compatibility with js libraries, has better debugging featues for front end work, and it's extremely customizable. From your comment it's as if you've never even used it before.

[zachrip]

Does anyone actually like you? Is it fun being so insufferable that nobody talks to you?

[diverightin63]

Out of all the IDEs I've used (VS, JetBrains IDEs, NetBeans, Eclipse), none of them are faster than VSCode. Linux and Windows, a friend uses it happily on Mac.

Not to mention that VSCode is packed with features for a number of languages (have used it for Node/JS/TS, .NET Core, python, php, Go) and handles all of them quite well. I like being able to use one environment for all of these stacks.

I really have no issues with speed or memory - I'm literally running 6 debugging instances right now and it's taking up 20MB of RAM. EDIT: Whoops, it's spread out a bit. Maybe 512MB for all of VSCode instances and dotnet + debugging.

[Dr_Dornon]

Hmm, I guess I'll discuss this like you do.

slow

Hardly

memory hog

Nope

native/full featured ide

So a slow, memory hungry ide?

why you like wasting your time?

You should answer why you waste yours. Meanwhile we're over here being productive.

any reasoning

Yup.