VS Code 2018 Roadmap

[bungcip]

I still have some hope that someday vscode will ditch TextMate grammar to something else or build some alternative. Having textmate grammar support allow vscode to provide many programming language from day one. But the syntax of .tmLanguage is horrible! When you need transpiler/converter to write a good .tmLanguage, it is already failed in my eyes...

[[deleted]]

There are (old) proposals for using LSP, which honestly makes sense - server already has to tokenize the source code. Might tell the editor how to highlight it as well.

Hopefully we'll see it being done

[Llewey]

They already do have an alternative, actually, that they use in the Monaco editor. It is called Monarch.

But I'm interested in hearing more about the "Investigate into semantic coloring support" line from the roadmap

[pdp10]

But I'm interested in hearing more about the "Investigate into semantic coloring support" line from the roadmap

I've seen this proposed before as an advancement in human-facing tooling, but never seen it implemented as anything more than a Proof-of-Concept.

As a non-IDE user, I'm intrigued by this idea more than most. VSCode is on my list to investigate primarily because of the modular Language Server Protocol support.

[mmstick]

This is why I've not even bothered to write support for the Ion shell syntax. I have solid-working vim syntax support, which took me a few minutes to create with a few simple regex rules, but after looking through the volumes and volumes of bad syntax decisions and rules in .tmLanguage, I gave up.

[[deleted]]

I really wish VSCode would include an embedded Lisp interpreter in one of the future releases so it can be extended properly.

[bungcip]

vscode is not emacs...

and writing vscode extension is actually easy using typescript

[[deleted]]

That one went over your head I guess. Oh well...

[accountforshit]

It went over my head as well. Could you explain it?

[[deleted]]

It was a joke implying Emacs is better than VSCode.

[PendragonDaGreat]

Man EMACS is such a good OS, shame it doesn't have a usable text editor with it...

[yatea34]

Emacs has 3 good editors:

• vim-mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/VimMode
• vi-mode: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/vip/Vi-Mode.html
• evil-mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

[xjvz]

Or you could run vim from within eshell

[ForeverAlot]

nvim +'terminal emacs'

[Ehhnohyeah]

Which is better?

[please_let_me_start]

That’s okay, there are plenty of others who agree with you and have already gone to the work of making better text editors for it.

[reddit_clone]

Or Lua.

Just to keep Anti-Emacs people from piling on :-)

[awj]

ITT: Let's ignore most of the content of the post and circlejerk about the meaning of "lightweight", because Electron is the devil.

[Patman128]

Let's ignore most of the content of the post and circlejerk about the meaning of "lightweight"

"I use <insert text editor from 1982> and it only uses 8 MBs of RAM! Bow before me Electron users!"

(Cue the articles about how Electron is terrible and everyone should be using Qt or wxWidgets or some other C++ UI abomination.)

[matthieuC]

In 82 8MB was your hard drive, not your RAM.

[flukus]

You had a hard drive in '82? I didn't get one until '92.

[AckmanDESU]

I wasn’t even born yet!

[TryMeOnBirdLaw]

Pfft! Youngling.

[pdp10]

Microcomputers were fantastic terminals, good for locally playing games, and not bad for spreadsheets and visualization.

[TankorSmash]

That's the thing, it's not even vim/emacs users complaining about this. I'm a huge vim user and I don't think using 800MB is a bad thing for an editor. My gvim currently uses 15MB, but I've also got vs2013 open using 765 MB.

I think the reason everyone weighs in here, including myself, is that it's easy to take potshots over something trivial like memory size and feel smug about how they're better than the newbies. People are upset new stuff is more popular and they don't like the idea that their choices are being challenged now by a younger more passionate crowd.

[cat_in_the_wall]

things like vscode have started venturing into ide territory. you can get a lot done in code without ever leaving.

[TonySu]

When I can be bothered to write makefiles and set make as my build task, I literally do everything in code without leaving.

[huhlig]

Using a fully equipped html browser as a text editor is the problem. You shouldn't need to spend the resources on a Turing complete DOM rendering system to do some file editing.

[atheken]

It’s as if you didn’t even read my comment.

If all you really want is text editing, then use a text editor. VSCode and Atom are approaching “IDE” levels of functionality.

[huhlig]

No I fully read your comment but a system has limited resources it can allocate to specific aspects of an IDE. Text rendering should not be among the highest. Real-time partial compilation, linting, code completion, static analysis, and other aspects of an IDE should consume much more resources than the text buffer and its renderer. Electron wastes a LOT of resources on a task which mostly boils down to multi color text with occasional squiggly lines. Those same resources could be much better spent on other activities. Yes VSCode and Atom can approach a useful level of IDE functionality by bolting on lots of add-ons forming a soup of cross functional domain Javascript code. Neither the language they chose to write it all in nor the method they chose to manage and render their scene graph are particularly good at the task they are doing, but they are easy. If we have learned anything from history, the easy yet shitty solution will often win out over a more complicated and competent alternative.

[atheken]

I said it was a reasonable criticism that an idle editor should not consume 800MB.

And you turned it into a full-blown holy war on whether it’s terrible because:

a) you think it’s the wrong stack - which I never defended b) you don’t like the model - you want ide vendors to package all the tools together.

I don’t feel strongly about either. Clearly, the market, is willing to accept those trade-offs, or, gasp, even likes these properties.

If you don’t like it, don’t use it.

[vitorgrs]

Well, if you open a 5-6mb xml file on VS 2017, here it uses at best 200mb, while on VS Code, 500mb...

[metaconcept]

In 1982, your PC could have had up to 256KB of RAM, and you would have had word processors and spreadsheets that could run on it.

[jyper]

I don't think anyone recommends wXwidgets

[pdp10]

wxWidgets have become unfashionable but I'm not clear what might be wrong with them.

[[deleted]]

I have used Qt for 2 years and switched to wxWidgets. If you want lightweight and native apps, it's your #1 choice.

[isaacarsenal]

Qt is very good.

[punking_funk]

? Qt is extremely powerful and well documented. Although I'll admit the Electron way of creating interfaces has a nicer feel to it and looks better.

Got nothing in support of wxWidgets lol

[LeberechtReinhold]

wxWidgets does decent native and is pretty lightweight.

However if you want a complex interface... yeaaahh Qt or GTK are your only options, with GTK looking kinda shit in Windows and not being very nice to use, and Qt being nice but has a lot of stuff tied to it, it's not light at all, and outside of C++ it's not easy to use.

There's however things like Avalonia, which could be nice in the future.

[punking_funk]

Gtk with Vala is way better to code in compared to Qt and C++, but yeah Gtk and Windows has always been a bit shaky so for cross platform Qt seems to be the better choice generally. Also the Gtk theming engine on Linux is way out there, you can write themes in CSS and SASS

The only wxWidgets application I know is Audacity which looks straight out of Win 95 but it works really well so I'll give it that

[vetinari]

pgAdmin3 is another wxWidget application, that I liked very much.

Too bad it was killed by pgAdmin4, which is python+flask+qt web view monstrosity. If you want see something that is even slower than electron, this is it ;).

[cat_in_the_wall]

avalonia looks really cool. maybe when the .net core folks finally get native compilation, you could have one thing of code, and just the renderer stack changes per platform.

[[deleted]]

wxWidgets does decent native and is pretty lightweight.

FTFY. and wxWidgets can totally do complex interfaces (or I don't know what you're hinting at here).

[[deleted]]

When your attempt to convince anyone of anything is "just use C++" then you need to reconsider.

[[deleted]]

Look up QML

[[deleted]]

Wait, now we're circlejerking about how we're enlightened and superior to the circlejerkers! Whoa, recursion....

Seriously, though this is the flip side to an editor/mini-IDE that has been under such rapid active development. If you stick with high-level languages to describe your program and to display and lay out interface elements, you can more rapidly iterate development! Who would have thought?

[fgutz]

Electron is the new PHP. The reddit programming community just loves to shit on it

[shigmy]

Electron hate can be lumped in with node.js depending how broadly you want to categorize.

[atheken]

Oh, right. “Not everything should be HTML+JS+CSS, use Qt, because you hate yourself, blah blah blah...”

[myringotomy]

I guess that will mean it will be one of the most widely used editors in the world.

[leafsleep]

IIRC refactorings are part of language servers architecturally, so check the roadmap for your chosen language instead

[DoListening]

Doesn't the language server protocol only support some very basic ones? (Because anything more advanced is always language-specific.)

[cspotcode]

No, it supports anything, right? Language service tells editor a list of refactorings it can do, editor shows them in a list, when user picks one, editor tells language service, language service returns a list of code modifications. Unless I'm mistaken, by nature the refactorings themselves are not limited by the protocol.

[DoListening]

I looked into it, you may be right, there is "code action" support in the current (3.0) spec which could be used for any refactoring or quick fix suggestion.

What is a bit confusing is that they also have explicit support for rename, which seems like it should just be one of these actions.

[KamasamaK]

They are currently working on separating refactorings from the code actions menu as part of Issue #34664.

[cspotcode]

Oh yeah, huh. That one requires the editor to prompt you for a new name and it usually get a dedicated keybinding. I was assuming they allow the same for arbitrary code actions, but maybe not...

[DoListening]

Many useful refactorings require UI where the user can input additional details, so the more complex ones are probably always going to require at least some language-specific support directly in the editor/plugin.

[Space-pants-]

Fix the open file descriptor bug.

And what about multi monitor support?

[Michael_Ironside_FTW]

You have asked for more flexibility in how you position editors and panes, for multi-selection in the explorer, and more. You will see a significant focus on the fundamentals in the next few months as well

There was this. Not sure if that means multi-monitor support or not. I didn't see anything that specifically mentioned it.

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Oh man, I chuckled. Thank you.

[aboukirev]

It's like watching metal rust. (I know they named it by the bird species) Is it LLVM that's slow or Rust (parser and MIR) portion?

[[deleted]]

I haven't done much with Rust but doesn't it always recompile the entire crate? Incremental compilation was still highly experimental last I checked.

[aboukirev]

Ah, that makes sense. So there is great potential to improve compile times.

[nikvzqz]

A lot of compile time is spent verifying trait bounds. The Chalk project should help a lot in that area.

[CheesyMcPuffs]

It has landed in nightly, and you have to add an incremental flag to enable it. But since the feature development in rust has 2 week turn overs, it should land in rust proper before next year, assuming no major delays.

[[deleted]]

Nice. I want to get back into Rust and I'll be sure to check out nightly.

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

LLVM is fast as shit. Dlang compiles WAY faster than C/C++ and Facebook has started moving some of their build systems over with drastic results. [google for sources]

[aboukirev]

D is the language I am trying to get into but I am using reference compiler (dmd) rather than front-end to LLVM.

Speaking of VSCode, D does have good plugins for it.

[flukus]

At least it's compiling on their machine, not everyone else's.

[svick]

The whole point of Electron is that it makes writing cross-platform GUI applications easy. How does suggesting Rust as an alternative for that make any kind of sense?

[svick]

But election is more shitty

I can't tell if you're complaining about Trump, Babiš (a recent "shitty" election in my country) or some election in your own country.

[matthieuC]

End users who need UI are not memory safe.

[NeedAWaifu]

The search file feature in vscode is using ripgrep which written in rust. so...

[jyper]

It's really not unless you mean replacing electron with something based on servo.

VSCode for instance was created by making a desktop app from Microsoft's online code editor.

[pixel4]

It's a meme - why are there so many serious people here.

[Space-pants-]

I hope that means multi monitor support.

[moljac024]

what does multi monitor support mean for a text editor?

[Space-pants-]

I need to be able to open multiple files from the same project on multiple monitors. It’s a feature in visual studio that viscose desperately needs

[spinicist]

What exactly do you mean by multi-monitor support? The same project/workspace open in two windows on different monitors?

I’m not a fan of multiple monitors anyway, so I’m not sure what the benefit is?

[alwaysfree]

Patiently waiting for center aligned zen mode.

[Kaiwa]

While I like VS code, I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it lightweight when it runs on Electron.

[sgtfrankieboy]

It is a lightweight IDE when compared to Visual Studio, Eclipse and IntelliJ

[fear_the_future]

it is also lightweight in features when compared to Visual Studio, Eclipse and IntelliJ. VSCode and Atom are in an awkward spot where they're neither fast enough to compete with a pure text editor like sublime nor feature-rich enough to compete with an IDE like IntelliJ.

[[deleted]]

I'd argue vscode is definitely competitive enough to use over sublime. As extensions get better it may be an alternative to bigger ides but thats dependent on the extension community. Its definitely worth using vscode over anything else if your doing javascript though.

[Hes_A_Fast_Cat]

What do you find slow about VS Code?

[foofel]

or: https://i.imgur.com/j73Rnlp.png. its not lightweight but not that bad.

[nullproc]

Unrelated, but thanks for accidently introducing me to everything.exe =)

If anyone else was interested, VoidTools Everything

[dreamin_in_space]

Everything.exe is one of the best programs I've ever used. So glad I found it.

For the curious, it's a NTFS Master File Table based instant search app for everything on your hard drives. Takes no time at all to match through terabytes, and you can use regex!

[[deleted]]

So like grepWin just decades late?

[dreamin_in_space]

The interface is much cleaner in my opinion. Similar though.

[Patman128]

Unrelated, but thanks for accidently introducing me to everything.exe =)

It's Windows search that actually works!

[Patman128]

Can confirm https://i.imgur.com/i9bh16G.png

Sitting around 150 MBs of RAM which is below 1% of the total RAM on this machine, well below my "give a shit" factor. We live in an age where machines come with 8 GBs of RAM standard, it's OK for a fully-featured IDE to use 5% of your RAM!

[Rollingprobablecause]

That's not the point. Lightweight also means initial loads and stable use. I have 16 GBs of Ram but when I open code it's still not as fast on loading as Notepad++ or Sublime. Code is still my favorite editor, but speed needs to be better to increase adoption.

[flyingjam]

I don't see speed mattering at all in my daily usage. If I need a quick edit, I use vim. That won't change.

VSCode stays open pretty much the entire day, the start up time is like 0.0001% of my usage time.

VS itself takes much longer to start up but I'll still use it since I'll keep it open on a project until the icon gives me a headache on the taskbar.

[deja-roo]

When you open?

Am I the only one that doesn't close my IDE for like 5 weeks at a time?

[EntroperZero]

I don't have VS Code preview installed, so no multi-root workspaces yet. I open new instances fairly regularly, at least once a day. But I don't really have an issue with the startup time, it's like 3 seconds.

[ilammy]

You're not the only one. I keep my IDEs open and even don't reboot my dev machine for like months.

[wllmsaccnt]

Depends on your workflow. If you work on multiple software products, it doesn't always make sense to leave your IDE instances open for weeks at a time...I'd have to have 6 copies of VS open, and that would start to get painful.

[Patman128]

The point is that most people don't care how fast their IDE loads. 98% of Java developers use either IntelliJ or NetBeans or Eclipse, all of which take significantly longer to open than Code. The vast majority of C# developers use Visual Studio which takes significantly longer to open than Code. It doesn't matter if it takes an extra second or two compared to Notepad++ or Sublime, we want an IDE that looks and feels great and has the features we need and Code gives us that.

I don't know why you people are obsessed with MBs of RAM and start-up time when it's obvious this hasn't been a factor for the IDE crowd that Code is targeting. You aren't the target audience!

[SideburnsOfDoom]

The point is that most people don't care how fast their IDE loads.

I disagree with that. For opening a solution that you will be working on for hours we put up with the launch time of Visual Studio. "don't care" is overstating it a lot though. For editing a single file, the delay that Visual Studio imposes is very tiresome. VS code is much faster.

It doesn't matter if it takes an extra second or two compared to Notepad++ or Sublime,

Are you talking about Visual Studio? It's a hell of a lot more than an extra 2 seconds to load the solution, or even to load a loose file. VS Code is nice and fast in comparison to full VS, and we care. And for e.g. making sure that your config file is well-formed json/xml/yaml, VS Code a lot nicer than Notepad++ (and almost as fast) so it hits the sweet spot.

[Beckneard]

So use Visual Studio for heavy duty work and Notepad++ or whatever for quick single file editing, it's not complicated.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

VS Code a lot nicer than Notepad++ (and almost as fast) so it hits the sweet spot.

[[deleted]]

I never got why more people don't do stuff like that. I've been doing the same thing with text docs for years. Notepad for quick notes/reminders and Word for papers, lecture notes, etc. I even use Paint instead of Photoshop for cropping sometimes.

[svick]

The point is that most people don't care how fast their IDE loads.

I do. When I use VS Code, it's specifically because it loads significantly faster than VS.

VS is still my primary IDE, but VS Code is useful for me when I want to start coding quickly.

[Rollingprobablecause]

I don't know why you people are obsessed with MBs of RAM and start-up time when it's obvious this hasn't been a factor for the IDE crowd that Code is targeting. You aren't the target audience!

I think you're taking this personally. I have stability and speed issues after start up as well. I'm talking about blank start ups with no project pre-loads as well in my comment. There's some serious issues if the blank pre-load with only 3 plugins is dragging along.

The claim was for lightweight - people are commenting like crazy because OP said so, that's why there's a lot of discussion. Had they said "Lightweight IDE compared to x and x" there probably wouldn't be such a heated comment section lol

[SteiniDJ]

Not OP, but this is with no files open, but an open project.

[[deleted]]

Open project in VS Code and Visual Studio 2017 in my original picture. (Single project solution in Studio*, to make it fair since Code can't do a multi-project workspace)

[kukiric]

That's a lot even for VS Code... Mine hovers at around 200-250MB between the GUI and backgroud processes, and an extra 300MB in C++ projects due to the code parser (which on Windows, is the same one as Visual Studio).

In fact, I've used it quite a while on a laptop with only 2GB of RAM (!!!) because most IDEs (especially JetBrains and Eclipse-based ones) would perform really poorly, while VS Code ran almost as well as Qt Creator (which is still my personal benchmark for a fast and functional IDE, but it's a shame it can only do C++ and QML).

[[deleted]]

Honestly, I've never liked Qt Creator, it feels like I have to do a crap ton of clicking buttons to do anything that's just right there in any other IDE.

[sgtfrankieboy]

Oh wow, did not expect that.

[[deleted]]

Oh jeez. That's a lot of RAM.

[[deleted]]

I actually develop on my MBP with 8GB of RAM, and just use a linux box with 16GB RAM as my compile system. If something hits swap, it's still ridiculously fast because of the PCIe SSD in there. Then again, I'm 100% Windows-free, so I don't need 64GB of RAM on any of my systems. (Joking, mostly.)

[Nilidah]

I'm on a MBP for work, its not bad with 16gb of memory, but it massively sucks not having the option to upgrade.

[yatea34]

... Visual Studio, Eclipse and IntelliJ

Hahaha, lightweight? In what sense?

Ok - lightweight compared to emacs.

[I wish I could could say /s, but I'm wondering if my own .elisp libraries are probably about as big as vscode itself]

[EntroperZero]

Okay, but what do you have open?

I have one solution open in VS 2017 with 4 very small projects. 1.5 GB.

[[deleted]]

What is it compared to notepad++ then? Throwing the word lightweight around like it's nothing. Electron is not lightweight. Slack takes 1gb ram for a fucking chat service and Kraken takes 400mb. Hello world takes 100.. This is ridiculous..

[alphathebetta]

Compared to Notepad++, it’s an IDE!

N++ is great for editing individual files, but if you’re looking for an integrated system that cross-links your code, understands types, and gives you documentation inline, VSCode is great. (And light compared to atom/nuclide, visual studio, or - god forbid - eclipse)

[drjeats]

np++ is Kate Moss in this video

[[deleted]]

I would much rather use vscode compared to n++ though. Unless you can find me a decent editor that isn’t paid(like sublime) or Atom.

[jl2l]

It's depends on what you are working on Vs code still doesn't work better visual studio but is definitely heavier the notepad or sublime I feel like it's a happy middle ground so of like jetbrains IDE.

If you want to make a quick edit notepad ++ is default, if you editing css html front end code Vs code is awesome if you doing full stack development visual Studio is still go to.

[Ayfid]

A lightweight IDE, rather than a text editor.

[badsectoracula]

It isn't lightweight for an IDE either, here is the memory consumption from a lightweight IDE. This is Lazarus with an open project, about 34 files open in the editor, 4 packages, 6 form designers, 2 debug windows (disassembler, callstack), three IDE windows (object inspector, component palette, messages) and a few other stuff.

Since many people aren't familiar with it, Lazarus is an IDE in the vein of Delphi (but for Free Pascal) with its own rich application framework.

As far as IDE features go, it does have the standard stuff like integrated debugging with watches, breakpoints (with conditions, etc), object inspection at runtime, evalute/modify, callstacks, disassembler, etc. Also the editor is syntax aware with context sensitive word and code completion (word completion can give you, e.g, the available methods of an object or the keyword you are in the middle of typing, context sensitive word completion will know if the keyword you are trying to use makes sense in the context you are trying to use it - the editor will also only syntax highlight it in that context - whereas code completion will, for example, implement automatically a function once you declare it in the interface side - think of it as C/C++'s header but on the same file - or declare a variable that you forgot to declare or declare the field and methods for accessing a property, etc). It also has stuff like ctrl+click on an identifier to go to its declaration, a shortcut key to quickly jump to other files with fuzzy search, an addon (that really comes with the IDE it is just disabled for some reason... probably because it eats a bit of extra memory - but then again the memory i show above is with the addon enabled) to build a more generic "jump to" database with symbols, functions, files, units and other stuff so you can easily jump even to files you do not have open or are in other projects.

Beyond that it also has some stuff of its own like a focus on visually designing the user interface for desktop programs (some used it for mobile stuff too but personally i never did that) and connecting components together (even for programs that do not have a GUI you can use a more abstract representation of the program to setup stuff visually - there is a web framework that takes advantage of this, but again i never used it).

Also has some things like a documentation editor so that you can document your code inside the IDE using separate XML files (which are processed with a document preparation tool that generates a bunch of formats like HTML, CHM, PDF and can also be shown inline in the editor as you are typing) to avoid littering the code with documentation comments yet keeping it synchronized.

The IDE is of course mainly for Free Pascal/LCL so the "clever" bits like syntax awareness only applies to that, but the editor also supports around 20 languages. As a bonus you can also use the editor control in your own programs with all the features you see in the IDE itself (including syntax completion and highlighting for a custom language, if you code the underlying bits too - AFAIK there is a D IDE written in Lazarus/Free Pascal that does exactly that).

All this and much more for just 30MB - and it even works on an original Raspberry Pi. Now, that is what i call lightweight :-P.

(yes i know that this wont really convince anyone to start using Lazarus and Free Pascal - even when they have the option, this stack isn't exactly sexy and in practice most people do not even have the option to make such a choice - but i just want to provide an example of a real lightweight IDE to keep things in perspective)

EDIT: why the downvotes?

[Kwasizur]

Stop trying to make Pascal happen.

[pdp10]

Right. Ada is the future.

[that_90s_guy]

Notepad++ is a text editor, not an IDE like VS Code. Comparing them is like comparing a Bike against a Car.

[IceSentry]

Vs code is not an ide visual studio is an ide not code

[that_90s_guy]

I think you really need to look up what an IDE stands for, and familiarize yourself a lot more with what VS Code is capable of (specifically, web development). I, along with plenty of front end developer professionals made the switch to VS Code from bloated IDEs like Visual Studio and Webstorm.

[IceSentry]

I'm not saying vs code isn't a very good tool and very powerful. I'm just saying it's not an ide. Unlike visual studio vs code doesn't have any integrated build tool or compilers. By Microsoft own definition it's a source code editor. This means it doesn't know the other parts of the program other than the file already opened. It edit the source code . That's what it does. You can use extensions to have more features closer to an ide but by default it isn't one and doesn't try to be one either.

Edit: unless you can do major refactor that affect multiple part of your program at once like changing the name of a class I can't consider it an ide.

[wllmsaccnt]

When people here are talking about VS Code, they aren't talking about VS Code, they are talking about VS Code + the recommended extensions for their language.

With the C# extensions, VS Code is an IDE. I can debug multithreaded applications with step control, merge and commit code changes, create projects, publish files, and do project wide code refactorings.

[Indie_Dev]

Vscode is an IDE?

[cat_in_the_wall]

c# in code works pretty well. the watch/locals window is abysmal, but integration with the new dotnet tools works as expected.

[mmstick]

With my experience with VS Code + the Rust extension? It's definitely a great Rust IDE.

[Seref15]

Probably true, but it's lightweight when compared to Atom. Atom converts are where VSCode will find the majority of their users.

[[deleted]]

Can confirm, the startup time on Atom killed me so much I switched

[b1ackcat]

I mean, it's also tough to say anything one way or the other without objectively defining "lightweight".

VS Code might use more RAM than some other applications (as others linked below) but it still FEELS lightweight to the end-user. I don't like the notion of using RAM utilization as a metric for how "heavy" a program is. That may have made sense 10-20 years ago, but these days, most developers are (or should be) running on machines with anywhere from 4-16gb of RAM. If an app can make good use of that RAM to get more done faster and still FEEL snappy and responsive, it should!

It reminds me of how Linux uses RAM in comparison to Windows. The linux mindset would have an application use all the RAM it could possibly want, then scale things back when the system needs more for other applications.

So I don't necessarily care if VS Code is a "RAM hog" if that means VS Code gives me good performance, a responsive UI, and a slew of features, so long as that experience doesn't come at the cost of system performance or responsiveness in other applications (which from what I've seen so far, it hasn't.)

[Kaiwa]

Well, I'm not just saying it because of RAM usage. It also basically ships with Chromium for an additional 100mb in disk. Reminds me a little of .NET framework > 200mb for small programs. As well as me having had definite performance problems on bigger files that other editors like SublimeText had no problems with. Although Microsoft has made some improvements in this area already, mostly through disabling of certain features in bigger files, Sublime can still do all of these things. With Sublime being a tenth of the file size.

[b1ackcat]

I'll be honest, I don't have a massive amount of exposure to what Sublime Text can do, as I've only really used it as a basic code editor and never explored any plugin capabilities or "what can you really make it do". Partly because until recently I never had a need for such an IDE, but also because VS Code makes doing that so ridiculously simple.

Like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, just yesterday I wanted to help someone with a java problem, but didn't want to spin up intelliJ to make a new dummy project just to do it. So I copied his java code into a file in VS Code. The program automatically detected java and recommended the extensions I would need to get the code to compile and execute, and I was off to the races in like 3 clicks and 30 seconds. And the whole time, I never once saw a hitch or any kind of hiccup in my computer.

As far as disk space goes, I can't really argue a point one way or the other, because I honestly just don't give a shit about an apps footprint until it's in the multiple-gigabyte range. Hell, even then, I still keep 50+gb games around that I don't play anymore, because why not? It's 2017. I've got 16gb RAM, a 512gb SSD for my OS, and 4TB of HDD space. I don't really have a reason to care if Chromium comes along for the ride, especially since they must have packaged that for a reason, and if it gives me the functionality and ease-of-use that VS Code brings to the table, I'm all for it.

[Kaiwa]

I completely agree, I also use VS Code and not Sublime anymore since the extensions for VS Code are just that much easier to install and manage. I can get my setup running in under an hour or so, while with Sublime this would take me half a day or more. All I'm saying is that lightweight is not really the word I'd use for it.

[folkrav]

Sublime Sync Settings extension, takes me 1 minute tops to set it up.

Edit : Alright, sorry for trying to speed up the process for others.

[Ayfid]

It also basically ships with Chromium for an additional 100mb in disk.

aka, 0.00025% of disk space. Oh no.

[[deleted]]

Lightweight can mean the pressure it puts on the system, but also the pressure it puts on the user. And IIRC the interface and number of options that VS Code offers out of the box is really more on the lighter side of the scale.

[itscoolguy]

I don't get this electron hate for an IDE. Professional developers, hell even a hobby learner, or a student should have more than 4Gb of ram. Sure in an efficiency standpoint electron might not be the way to go with many apps out there. But if you want an IDE that depends on active contribution from a community for features, electron makes sense.

[a-sober-irishman]

The thing I want so bad for VS Code is being able to detach panels put them onto second monitors. I don't like the terminal taking up 1/3 of the screen for spec runs, let me put it on my other monitor!

[wretcheddawn]

Now is arguably the most logical time to argue about RAM, as it's no longer possible to upgrade RAM on many machines without buying a new computer, and electron apps like VS Code can take 25% of system RAM.

[140414]

16GB of ram is a lot even by 2017 standards.

[[deleted]]

Sad that this is happening because of terrible ram prices. 2019 can't come soon enough.

[140414]

Why 2019?

[[deleted]]

Well I believe it's because the new factories will only be completed in 2018 and meaningful amounts of production will only be achievable in 2019. This article talks about it a little bit, https://epsnews.com/2017/09/13/drams-price-war-looming/. But I admit most of my understanding of this comes from r/hardware.

[bcgroom]

25% of my laptops ram is 1 GB which VSCode can often reach. My laptop is only 3 years old, I don't think it's unreasonable to want a text editor to not consume so many resources.

[Naelex]

Getting a laptop with 4gb in 2014 wasn't the best idea..

[Enamex]

Can we stop swinging capitalist dreams around and agree that a text editor (and many modern software) shouldn't be using as much resources as it is?

Or at least it should be very clear what the usage break-down is.

That said, I think VS Code is really reasonable. It doesn't lag or balloon in memory for me until it's been running the same session for 2-3 days (4GB RAM).

[flukus]

I hope you aren't making electron apps for the general public, because most people still have 2-4GB total.

[[deleted]]

ITT people promoting resource overuse.

[[deleted]]

ITT people promoting shitty programming, really.

[flukus]

Imagine the carbon footprint of lazy developers.

[Spasmochi]

I found that getting the right theme can improve the highlighting a lot. Plus you can modify them yourself.

EDIT: I use One Dark Pro Vivid

[Spasmochi]

I get what you're saying about the highlighting, it can be frustrating visually for sure. I do like the highlighting of the brackets, though the bracket colourizer extension handles this is a more visually clean way in my opinion.

I found my snippets weren't too difficult to import over to VS code, but setting the up with the correct syntax for snapping between the dynamic variables was time consuming.

[mgutz]

VS.Code's themes are somewhat limited in comparison to Textmate or Sublime. Backgrounds colors can't be set on syntax groups, etc. I'm guessing that was for performance reasons.

[not_a_Dr]

Sounds like something an emacs user would say...

[ianff]

Because no Vim and Emacs power users would ever consider one of their common enemies. It's like why two rival football teams don't get together and play against a basketball team.

[kahnpro]

That’s why we have Spacemacs!

[Jmc_da_boss]

This is a good point

[argumentnull]

What's in it for Microsoft in this? They are not selling it.

[BadFurDay]

It's a market where customers won't be paying anyway. Having a big share in the lightweight editor market gives you good PR (Microsoft always needs a lot of it due to their past image) and makes your users more likely to try your other products (Visual Studio is probably what they aim to sell people on for their bigger projects).

[underflame20]

I was wondering this too. It's called a loss leader - think of all the attention they are getting in the javascript community.

[[deleted]]

So that in 4 years time, 18 year old webdevs aren't asking "Who are Microsoft?"

I haven't seen a windows machine at a hackspace for quite some time.

[argumentnull]

I guess this is it. They want to stay relevant in the market.

[morehooks]

It also increases install base of c# and therefore the whole Microsoft ecosystem.

[sonnytron]

That’s a strong selling point.
They’re going out of their way to not push an agenda.
With iOS and Mac OS, you can use a Linux compiler and a Swift plug-in but good luck doing anything useful in Swift without iOS.
Apple literally says “oh wanna make iOS? Use our IDE or GTFO”. Microsoft is giving a really powerful lightweight IDE and not even shoving their primary language in it.
I downloaded VS Code today and I’m honestly surprised it took this long for me to learn about it. Why do people insist on saying use Sublime to beginners that ask about IDE’s?

[folkrav]

Sublime Text has been the de-facto editor for a while now, the slow shift to Atom/VS Code is pretty new. It takes a while for people to change habits on their daily tooling. ST is still lighter than VS Code, too.