I've had entirely the opposite experience. Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime? You have to use a separate tool, Package Control, whose installation instructions are arcane:
And once it's installed interaction is limited to the textual omnimenu-thing, since Sublime's extension API is extremely limited. Package Control is awesome for what it is, but it's severely constrained by not being a first-class feature of the UI.
In VSCode, by contrast, there's a proper UI for extension installation that's part of the core product. Clicking on the extension brings up a full-viewport window with the README and quick links to the reviews and GitHub. I've had a lot of luck finding quality extensions by installing the official Microsoft extension, if one exists, or otherwise using number of downloads/reviews/GitHub activity as a rough proxy for quality.
JetBrains IDEs have a very similar extension installation experience to VSCode (i.e., good), but I've anecdotally found the available JetBrains extensions to be lower quality than their analogous VSCode extensions. For example, I _still_ can't find a good comment-wrapping plugin for JetBrains—everything I've tried has some weird deficiency, like not being able to wrap comments at a different column than the code width, or sometimes butchering surrounding code, etc.
I'll admit that the one frustration I have with VSCode is that there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation. I recently set up a new computer and spent the first few weeks rediscovering all the extensions I'd installed on my old computer.
I'm curious to know if there's an editor/IDE that you think has a far superior plugin experience than VSCode.
>I've had entirely the opposite experience. Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime? You have to use a separate tool, Package Control, whose installation instructions are arcane:
Not since the last 5 years or so, where it's built-in to ST.
I've been using ST3 for like 5 years (in beta) and it was just as stable as the "stable" release.
There was absolutely no reason to use ST3 for the past 3 years if you already used ST/ST2.
That was already the case for ST2, which was stable for years before it officially announced it was "stable".
Stable/unstable for STx are just labels, they don't actually reflect the state of stability. Plus all the real work (new plugins, etc) happened on the "beta" ST3 side for years...
> I'll admit that the one frustration I have with VSCode is that there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation. I recently set up a new computer and spent the first few weeks rediscovering all the extensions I'd installed on my old computer.
I've used this with success, but in the end I found my settings / plugins are minimal so I don't bother with it now. I have like 4 settings and 5 plugins.
Have you ever tried to install a package in Sublime? [...] In VSCode, by contrast
It's probably not actually true but I've often felt the people working on the VSCode UI are guided by the core principle of 'it has to be less infuriating than Sublime'. They are very good at this.
> there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation
You can define workspace plugins in `.vscode/settings.json` and make extensions recommended for a project by putting them in `.vscode/extensions.json`. Hope this helps!
Just a heads up - there is an extension for syncing extensions. It's aptly named Settings Sync, and uses a Github gist to share a manifest of plugins and configuration. You can find it here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...
In VSCode, by contrast, there's a proper UI for extension installation that's part of the core product. Clicking on the extension brings up a full-viewport window with the README and quick links to the reviews and GitHub. I've had a lot of luck finding quality extensions by installing the official Microsoft extension, if one exists, or otherwise using number of downloads/reviews/GitHub activity as a rough proxy for quality.
JetBrains IDEs have a very similar extension installation experience to VSCode (i.e., good), but I've anecdotally found the available JetBrains extensions to be lower quality than their analogous VSCode extensions. For example, I _still_ can't find a good comment-wrapping plugin for JetBrains—everything I've tried has some weird deficiency, like not being able to wrap comments at a different column than the code width, or sometimes butchering surrounding code, etc.
I'll admit that the one frustration I have with VSCode is that there is no way, at least not that I've found, to export your entire configuration, both settings and plugins, and use that to bootstrap a new VSCode installation. I recently set up a new computer and spent the first few weeks rediscovering all the extensions I'd installed on my old computer.
I'm curious to know if there's an editor/IDE that you think has a far superior plugin experience than VSCode.