
Visual Studio Code 1.2 released - cryptos
https://code.visualstudio.com/Updates#1.2
======
d3ckard
I'm not ready for transition (using atom at the moment and considering
spacemacs due to elixir), but VS Code is really impressive in terms of speed.
Atom is cool, but it's really slow. I thought it was because Electron, MS
proved me wrong. Point for them.

~~~
Pharylon
I switched from Atom a few weeks ago, and haven't back. I do miss Atom's regex
support in Find All, but I use it rarely enough that I can just fire up Atom
when I need it.

Enough of the keyboard commands are borrowed from Atom that it makes the
switch pretty painless.

~~~
christophilus
VSCode has regex support in find all (it's the little .* that you see on the
right-side of the search box).

~~~
s369610
wont match \n though
[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/313](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/313)

~~~
ivl
The last comment on that issue from alexandrudima makes it look like it'll be
in the next release, if we're lucky.

------
zeroxfe
I've been a vi person for over two decades, and switched to VS Code a few
months ago. It's really fantastic for a lot of modern development especially
web stuff (and golang.) As they add features, I hope they continue to drive
the UI latency down and keep it snappy.

~~~
arkaeologic
Hi. I've been looking for someone that uses vi seriously. I have struggled to
use it quickly. Can you give me or do you know of a short screencast of
someone using vi at their comfortable speed. I can't understand yet how it can
be faster than autocomplete.

~~~
alkonaut
What is faster than autocomplete? vi is an editor just like vs code. You can
use autocomplete and other features in vi too.

~~~
arkaeologic
Sorry, I don't mean autocomplete. I mean other editors that do not rely on a
large number of keyboard shortcuts. I have never seen someone use vim quickly.

~~~
MichaelGG
I've been using vim inside of VS for a while (ViEmu and VsVim) as well as in
Emacs (Evil) and straight vim for light editing. Of course typing a word out
will be faster with autocomplete - it's less keystrokes. Where I find speed is
navigating around lines, changing/deleting stuff (like changing inside parens
or a string, deleting multiple lines, etc). It's small stuff that really adds
up.

The real killer is quick macros. If I have to transform a bunch of lines, it's
just a "qa<work>q" and a "@a" away. It's pretty amazing.

At first vim doesn't seem that great, but after using it for a while it's
indispensable. Somewhere along the line you go from having to think about all
the strange keystrokes to just getting a feel for it. Doesn't hurt that it
makes you feel like a wizard, too.

Comparing with Emacs is a hands-down win - having to press Ctrl Alt whatever
just to move around is silly. Emacs+Evil is sweet though. Comparing with VS's
editor (Windows style, with Ctrl+Arrows for things) is also a huge win.
Windows editing just isn't amazing.

VSCode's lack of full vim support is very disappointing.

~~~
KurtMueller
I really like spacemacs as it seems to bring the best of both emacs and vi. If
you like evil, I recommend checking out spacemacs.

------
cm3
What kind of environments (software, hardware) is everyone running this one? I
tried it once, and I found it much more sluggish and unresponsive compared to
my X11 Emacs setup.

EDIT: I should add that I have all the bells and whistles like excellent fuzzy
input selection via ido and even live preview of Markdown rendering via
markdown-mode plus eww (requires Emacs to be built with libxml2). Plus on the
fly error checking if I need it, auto completion, terminal emulators, etc.
Just saying, before anyone argues Emacs doesn't support modern amenities.

~~~
randallsquared
I run it on a Macbook Pro 15 2015, a Macbook Air 11 2011, and a frankenbox
with an i7 from 2013.

On the Air it takes 10 seconds or so to launch. On the others it's less than 5
seconds. Compare to PHPStorm, which is kinda useable in less than 30 seconds,
and takes a minute or two to index a relatively small codebase and be fully
useable. (Of course, PHPStorm does a lot more than VS Code, but I find that I
don't use it anymore anyway; testing startup time just now was the first time
I'd opened it in months. I guess I should stop paying for it.)

~~~
cm3
I'd go nuts with such long launch times, regardless of daemon mode.

~~~
randallsquared
When I use a command line editor, I tend to launch a new editor for each file,
edit, save, and quit. For GUI editors, I tend to just leave them running on
some desktop and add files to them, so I rarely start them and wait; instead I
just open a new file or a new window and continue.

------
markbao
The UI has always held me back from using VS Code, though the performance and
new features look great. Glad that tab support is coming, and it's cool that
they have a detailed iteration plan for June publicly available:
[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/7253](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/7253)

~~~
perezdev
I'm stoked they're going to add tabs. When they first launched code, they said
they didn't want tabs. I guess they thought the document explorer thing was
the best option. But it totally turned me off from using Code.

~~~
cmiles74
Personally, I like the document explorer more than tabs. It's very clear which
files have been edited. I use IntelliJ IDEA and periodically I have to stop
and clear out unused tabs as it gets too crowded.

------
oblio
I love their focus on user requested features. Within a few releases (probably
4-6 months) they will add tab and terminal support.

Really cool!

~~~
pingec
Terminal is already in there and mentioned in the root link. Just press Ctrl+`
and it will show up.

~~~
rcarmo
Need to change that key binding... thanks to the US-centric take we've had on
keyboards since the TTY days, that key combination doesn't make sense on a
Portuguese keyboard.

~~~
hrvbr
It's Ctrl+ù on French keyboards. Maybe they customized it for Portuguese
keyboards too.

~~~
rcarmo
They did, they're using Ctrl+ç, which is a nice way to use an otherwise
useless key for programming, but hardly memorable or ergonomic for me - I'll
go and use Ctrl-Shift-T as well, which is what I use in Openbox ;)

~~~
monsieurbanana
I wouldn't recommend. What if you use VScode in openbox?

------
eklavya
Can't recommend this enough. Especially if you do react/react native work.
Thank you so much microsoft for this. Do not be prejudiced against the
technology just give it a try and see for yourself.

~~~
zxcvcxz
I just opened a project in VSCode, closed the VSCode, deleted the project, and
now when I try to open VScode the program won't load. Did I break it?

Also, how do I autocomplete using suggestions from other files within the
project directory?

~~~
joaomoreno
Do you mind filing that issue?
[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/new](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/new)

------
noir_lord
One thing I liked so much about vscode is it's default 'VS Dark' syntax
scheme, so much so I modified a copy of it for intellij which makes things a
lot less jarring when jumping from one to the other.

Each release is much better than the last and the momentum behind the releases
is incredible.

------
soofaloofa
What's the state of vim plugins for VS Code?

I would love to use it for Go programming but I'm so used to vim key bindings
that it's hard to switch. I can use IntelliJ because their vim plugin is
pretty good; anything of similar quality for VS Code?

~~~
jzelinskie
It's pretty poor; expect only the basics of moving. I don't think this is a
technical problem though, just a plugin maturity problem.

~~~
pc86
Sounds like they should use IntelliJ to write a VSC plugin so they can switch
to VSC :)

~~~
moosingin3space
I'd really like to see them use neovim to interpret commands. IIRC there's an
Atom plugin for just that.

------
piyush_soni
I can't help but notice how difficult it is (still) in both Visual Studio and
Visual Studio code to add syntax highlighting/intellisense features for a new
language, whereas Notepad++ can do it so easily by just adding a simple XML
file of commands and their parameters. I tried writing an Extension in Visual
Studio for the "Scheme Programming Language" and tried to understand all of
their infrastructure for it, but the complexity involved just turned me off.

~~~
FatalBaboon
That's because Intellisense is not about regexp matching.

Consider how in Emacs there are usually simple packages for a language (say,
ruby-mode), and complex ones for live-analysis (say, robe).

~~~
piyush_soni
Yes, I would expect a similar 'limited support' by Visual Studio proper (may-
be by simple regexp matching). I think Notepad++'s implementation is not very
smart, but it does the basic job of syntax highlighting, function name auto-
completion, arguments hinting etc. You should need to write a detailed
extension using Visual Studio's Format Specifiers and Classifiers etc. only
when you need a deeper integration IMO.

------
mmgutz
Is the status bar themeable yet? It sticks out like sore thumb relative to
beautiful themes available.

------
mrweasel
Visual Studio Code looks nice, the feature set is impressive and I can't
figure out how to use it.

Honestly I find it to be way to confusing to setup. The whole configuration
via json files is fine, except they don't seem to be well documented. If fact
the whole thing is really substandard for a Microsoft developer tool, they are
usually much better at documentation.

It might just be me, but I find there to be almost zero discoverability for...
well anything.

------
rejschaap
The automatically inserted whitespace always bothered me in VS Code. When
writing code without an auto-formatter I always end up noticing the extra
whitespace in the diff before committing and end up hunting it down.
Automatically trimming the automatically inserted whitespace sounds like a
somewhat complicated solution. It makes me wonder how other editors handle
this, because I never had this problem with other editors.

~~~
vanderZwan
Could you expand on why you don't like to use an auto-formatter? I'm genuinely
curious.

I'm pretty addicted to them; they add consistency without me having to think
about it (killing off bike-shedding in the process), and in practice it works
a bit like a visual semi-linter: if the auto-formatting doesn't produce the
expected pattern (and your mind very quickly picks up the pattern
subconsciously), it usually means there's a bug in the code somewhere around
the area where it goes wrong.

~~~
rejschaap
I do like to use auto-formatters, but sometimes they are not available. For
instance, until recently I didn't have anything for rust-lang. But rustfmt is
pretty good now and VS code has good support for rust-lang through the
RustyCode extension.

------
codegeek
visual studio code has been amazing so far. Lightweight compared to the good
old Visual Studio but still has the powerful feature of great debugging,
already an awesome extensions marketplace and the best part: cross platform.

I have been using it for PHP development and loving it. The only nitpick if I
may is that their Git integration is a bit plain. By this, I mean that I
cannot see individual commits within the editor yet.

------
tiv
I really like VS Code, but I can't use it for my primary work, which is in
Vue.js, right now. There's an extension for .vue files, but the author claims
it is currently not possible to leverage VS Code's JS features like
highlighting and intellisense from within <script> blocks inside these files,
which I need before I can make the switch.

------
tbyehl
Somehow about a month ago r/powershell convinced me that I needed to give VS
code a look. There aren't any free / cheap multi-purpose editors that handle
Powershell IntelliSense worth a damn, so given all the effort Microsoft has
been putting into the Poshtools extension for Visual Studio I figured maybe
we'd see something good in VS Code.

I was horribly wrong. It is so comically bad at Powershell that I took
screenshots. It has some coloring... and everything else it's doing is broken.

[http://imgur.com/a/whluQ](http://imgur.com/a/whluQ)

Makes me wonder why VS Code even exists. There is no shortage of first-class
editors for every other language that VS Code supports. The one language with
a genuine need for a great new editor, a language from Microsoft no less, is
supported in a manner that doesn't even rise to the level of half-assed.

#smh

------
vonklaus
YES! finally they are starting to add tabs. I switched to vscode from sublime,
really the only annoying thing is lack of tabs.

> it will take numerous iterations to get it right.

Still, this is awesome. Atom was pretty good, except it straight up crawls
sometimes. Often, you have to disable syntax highlighting. I flagged an ussue
a whike back where it took > 56 seconds to open a .json file.

Surprisingly, as a mac user, i really like vsc. it has drag drop sidebar,
decent configurable settings, intellisense & syntax highlighting are pretty
good, and some other pretty sane features. Top shelf tab support is the only
major thing it really lacks.

------
alexc05
I just noticed this in the blog / release notes:

    
    
        >Comparing files
        > We have added a new API command that allows you
        > to use the diff-editor on two arbitrary resources 
        > like so:
        > commands.executeCommand('vscode.diff', uri1, uri2)
    

does anyone know where I can enter commands so I can try that out?

Reading that, it seems like I can use VSCODE to diff two different web pages?

That'd be really cool if I could (for example):

    
    
          commands.executeCommand('vscode.diff', "http://www.google.com", "http://www.google.ca")

~~~
grenoire
The F1 keys opens up the command palette [1], I'm assuming it's accessible
through there.

[1]:
[https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/codebasics](https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/codebasics)

------
disease
Can anyone speak to the difficulty of creating a repl in VS Code?

I'm already using it for all my front-end work but if I could use an
integrated Clojure repl the same way I use CIDER in Emacs it would be awesome.

~~~
Nelkins
There is an F# REPL for VS Code[1], so it's possible at least. Can't say how
hard it is though.

[1] [http://ionide.io/](http://ionide.io/)

------
ausjke
A decent light-weight editor, with the newly added terminal (early-stage, for
me UTF-8 is not shown correctly) it gets close to what geany provides.

I'm now switching between geany and vscode daily.

------
arc0re
Is it me or VSCode is having a new release right after Atom? hehe

~~~
swalsh
They usually release once a month. This is not the Microsoft of yesteryear
with 1 monolithic release perfectly tested, and released once every other
year.

They're making incremental progress, and releasing often. The software is
noticeably better than it was even 2 months ago.

I write C#, JS, PHP, and Python... and I can do development for ALL of those
languages in the same IDE. It's kind of great.

~~~
arc0re
Indeed I prefer that kind of "rolling" development.

------
lawnchair_larry
Can't wait until they port it to a native language and don't have to include
chrome and node.js.

~~~
coldtea
So, like never? Also, if it's fast at what it does, what is it to you if it
uses v8 and node?

~~~
rplnt
It's not fast as what it does though. Opening files takes ages.

~~~
taude
You don't use it to open a single file for editing, though. Think of it as a
lightweight IDE. Use it to open you folder project, which I do once every few
days or even per weekly reboot. Once it's up and running - which takes about 5
seconds for my project folder to open on a MBAir - its plenty snappy for
editing code.

For one-off file edits, like my .bash_profile, nginx conf etc., I still use a
terminal-based editor, which is what I'd use on a remote machine anyway.

~~~
rplnt
So I would have to use two different editors, customize both, get used to
both? That doesn't make sense to me (to be fair, mostly because I rarely have
the need for IDE). But if I had, why use a lightweight IDE instead of a "full"
one (say Visual Studio, JetBrains *, ...)?

~~~
deno
If you don’t need a ‘full’ IDE there’s a lot of mental complexity you can
avoid by going à la carte (editor+plugins). It’s easier to add features you
care about than learn about a bunch of stuff you’ll never use. That’s very
subjective, of course.

~~~
rplnt
No, I see what you mean and I guess I agree. But learning how to invoke a
feature or installing it should be equal I think.

------
xfilipe
Why they don't implement file-icons, everyone is asking for it...
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=robertoh...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=robertohuertasm.vscode-
icons)

~~~
rcarmo
Actually, I've been using it since the beginning and have no interest on file
icons - I like it just the way it is, without colored baubles festooning an
otherwise monochrome and distraction-free file tree.

(I prefer reading the file extensions anyway, since they stick out on the
right hand side)

------
anotheryou
Will it someday merge or integrate with visual studio?

~~~
nkassis
doubtful, seems to me that the whole point is to provide a light weight cross
platform editor that supports asp.net core, typescript etc... in order to
drive adoption of those technologies.

Merging it with VS would either require making VS cross platform (massive
undertaking I would think) or a massive rewrite which would have dubious value
to MS.

------
holografix
Python?

~~~
sethammons
Better than sublime, not as good as pycharm. I find it good enough.

~~~
arc0re
People need to stop comparing text editors (vim, emacs, Sublime Text, VSCode,
Atom...) to full featured IDEs (Visual Studio, Intellij Idea/PyCharm/PHPStorm,
Eclipse...). Of course, an IDE is going to have way more features for its
language. For a text editor, VSCode has an excellent Python support.

~~~
deno
There’s no clear line that separates an editor from an IDE. Editor + language
plugin is basically = IDE.

There’s nothing magic about an IDE, it’s just a very, very, bloated editor.

~~~
k__
True.

If you look at notepad, emacs, atom, vscode, sublime, vs, webstorm and such,
they're all somewhere distributed on a continuum between IDE and editor.

VSCode has a superb Git integration, but what has this to do with an editor?

------
zxcvcxz
My work-flow involves containerized development environments that sit on a
remote server. I spin up a new container for each project and login over SSH
to work on the projects using tmux/vim.

With this setup I can work on all sorts of resource intensive projects on a
lightweight laptop because everything is built and run remotely.

Now I could SSHFS every project and open it up with VS code, but unless I'm
sending commands to the server some other way, it's going to be built locally,
which is very inconvenient, especially when working with multiple projects.

If VScode can one day operate in a terminal over an SSH connection it might
replace vim, but that's not going to happen.

Vim has a TUI, GUI, tabs, and is still much more responsive than VScode, even
over an ssh connection.

Lastly, MS has been really bad for developers and end users. Their latest OS
comes with spyware (telemetry) and adware (candycrush), so I tend to stay away
from MS products in general because I don't think Microsoft has done anything
to deserve my support.

I can see why VScode is preferred on Windows though, I've never seen a decent
terminal emulator with good font rendering on Windows so vim must be a pain to
look at.

~~~
WayneBro
It seems like I see you commenting on every single article posted about
Microsoft here and you always seem to have something negative to say about
Microsoft.

What's your point in commenting? Do you really think you're adding to the
conversation and deserve upvotes or are you on a mission to let everybody here
know that you hate Microsoft and that you don't think anybody should be doing
anything with Microsoft?

Honestly - what do you expect to accomplish and what did Microsoft ever do to
you?

Did Microsoft kill your pappy? -
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx)

~~~
zxcvcxz
Microsoft is a branch of the NSA and makes an OS that comes with spyware
(telemetry) and adware (candycrush).

No, I don't like Microsoft very much.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents)

MS hates freedom. Should we forgive Bill Cosby too?

>What's your point in commenting?

Read the comment. VSCode doesn't have a TUI. I have a legitimate criticism.
All my criticisms of VSCode and Windows are legitimate.

~~~
dang
You've been breaking the HN guidelines by posting uncivil, unsubstantive
comments. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop doing that. Instead,
please (re)-read the following and post civilly and substantively, or not at
all.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

------
xabi
Electron overhead :(

~~~
pingec
How else would you port a typescript/javascript editor to the Desktop? They do
state they are working on decoupling the core Monaco editor but where else
would you host it to make it faster?

~~~
mike_hearn
You wouldn't write it in Javascript to start with!

------
kevinSuttle
Not installing until I don't have to reload the entire app after adding or
removing an extension. Not to mention the weird `lineHeight` setting.

~~~
Someone1234
How often do you install extensions? Seems like one of those bothersome things
during setup, but I doubt it would be impactful once you have it the way you
wish to have it.

------
WayneBro
Every time I try VSCode I find that it's still missing text editing features
that have been in Visual Studio 2015 since forever. Like bookmarks. How can
you use an editor that doesn't have native bookmarking ability? It also didn't
have code folding for the longest time. I think they got it now...

So, I don't know why anybody who is running Windows would choose VSCode. I get
why people running OS X and Linux would choose VSCode (obviously they have no
access to the full Visual Studio) but does anybody on Windows actually use
this?

~~~
sker
Search and Replace in multiple files. That's among the top 10 features that
should've been available since release 0.0.1 in any code editor. They're at
1.2 now and still no cigar. Who's the project manager who keeps saying "nah,
don't need it"?

Then again, it's a good litmus test. If you find yourself opening your old
editor to do something so basic your new editor can't do: what the hell are
you doing in your new editor?

~~~
ngrilly
Same for me. The lack of "search and replace in multiple files" is the main
issue preventing me to switch (and maybe an offline spell checker). I hope
they fix this soon!

------
nnq
Let me guess... it still can't just automagically auto-complete, auto-param
infos and jump-to-definitions, based on requires in nodejs projects (and, no,
not for TS, for plain JS)?

Seems like a pretty low bar... but at 1.0 they were still not there, and
Javascript is obviously one of the languages they focus on...

~~~
eknkc
It does with a simple jsconfig.json file:
[https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/javascript](https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/javascript)

Has pretty decent autocomplete, param info, jumps to definitions and
references.

