Ever since my university days, I've always used Sublime Text for any sort of text editing and programming tasks, in general.
Despite the annoying "Subscription" dialog box, I like it because it's lightweight, simple and had nice keybindings that made it much more productive.
This week, I thought of taking Visual Studio Code for a drive, not because many developers are using it but personally, I wanted to know if it can be better than Sublime Text.
The answer is yes, it is and here's what I have experienced so far.
Portability
What I like at first is that, it's cross-platform and has support for different operating systems in various architectures. At work, I use Windows 10 and at home, I use Fedora 35 Workstation and it runs fine on both operating systems.
Intellisense, Intellisense, Intellisense...
Intellisense is a term used by Microsoft that includes various features like: code completion, code hinting, method parameter information and more. By default, the editor supports Intellisense for JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML and CSS. But if you install different programming language extensions like Python, PHP, Golang and so on, you'll be able to configure your editor to have a much more richer experience.
At work, I write PHP code and use Laravel framework to develop web applications, I installed the following extensions to make my coding experience much more productive:
- PHP Intelephense (bmewburn.vscode-intelephense-client)
- phpfmt (kokororin.vscode-phpfmt)
- Laravel Snippets (onecentlin.laravel-blade)
Sublime Text and Vim Keybindings
If you've never used Vim, please go ahead and try. I believe that every programmer should try using VIM instead of fearing the keybindings (like :q) as they were developed for a reason.
But unlike Vim, Sublime Text keybindings are quite fun especially when you want to duplicate a line of code, indent lines of code, matching multiple instances of the same keyword and modifying them with multiple cursors at the same time.
Try installing these extensions and see if you like them:
- Vim Emulation for Visual Studio Code (vscodevim.vim)
- Sublime Text Keymap and Settings Importer (ms-vscode.sublime-keybindings)
Integrated Terminal
You can use different type of shells like Windows Powershell, Command Prompt, Git Bash and much more. Besides IMO, I found that using the integrated terminal was quite productive as I didn't have to switch windows in between.
Looks minimal
When it comes to UI/UX, the word minimalism is often subjective but I guess Microsoft embraced the principles of minimalism for this editor.
Lots of extensions and great support
Thanks to the open source community, there are hundreds and thousands of extensions out there. By installing various extensions, you can make it your own editor and that part fascinates me.
Besides, it's developed by Microsoft, so it definitely has a strong support and community out there.
Conclusion
I guess the simplicity and flexibility of this editor is what made it more powerful amongst the developer community.
Now, I'm not going to say that it's a flawless editor, just like every other pieces of software, it does have it's cons. However, I decided to try out Visual Studio Code for a while and see how it goes for me.
If it doesn't then maybe I might write a post about why I didn't like using it, in the future.
Hope you liked reading this article.