I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
Well I guess I can give my opinion as a former VSCode and Vim user that migrated to Helix. @[email protected] was curious too.
Way back when, I used Sublime Text and got proficient with those keyboard shortcuts. Then VSCode eclipsed (pun unintended) Sublime, so I switched and I was thankfully able to keep using Sublime key bindings. I was also productive with VSCode, except it wasn’t popular at the company I was working at, where most people used Vim. I ended up learning a bit of Vim for pair programming, but I still clinged to VSCode, even though it lacked proper support for connecting to a VM via SSH (which was a very common workflow).
At some point I realized that it was important to have a totally keyboard-centric workflow to level up my productivity and ergonomics, and being able to use a mouse in VSCode was hindering my progress. So I tried NeoVim, and it was kind of a nightmare. I know many people enjoy tinkering with Lua to get NeoVim working as they want, but I found it more of a barrier to productivity than anything else.
So then I learned about Helix, and it seemed like a love letter to devs that just want a modal in-terminal editor that works out of the box and has modern features like LSP support, DAP, etc. Also it’s written in Rust by good maintainers. I haven’t looked back, because the Helix + Tmux combo is incredibly versatile.