Sad to see this go. I was an early adopter of Atom, and I wrote two extensions for it, one of which while it was still in beta.
The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engineering built around TypeScript, was rapidly taking over.
Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.
While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.
Atom predated the LSP and leaned heavily into customizations with all the plugins running inside the UI thread (more like a traditional web page and 3p scripts). At the time they viewed the extreme customization support as a feature, and there was a thriving ecosystem of folks making plugins.
That architecture has a major flaw though. A default install was fast, but a real configuration with all the plugins ended up quite slow.
VSCode's architecture worked much better in real world configurations, and it turns out better performance wins in the editor space, even if it meant losing certain customizations (up to a limit). The architecture also allowed seamless remote editing, something Atom never could have done.
The interesting thing has always been that both were built on Electron. Atom's developers had built all the tools and primitives needed, they just didn't have the understanding of the long term ecosystem effects of their design.
VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn.
VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with which VSCode has a symbiotic relationship), the limited, slowly expanding extension API, LSP, the monorepo, the monthly release cadence, the built-in terminal, and the list goes on and on. They turned Electron's strengths into super-strengths, and deftly engineered around Electron's weaknesses. VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering, and it fully deserves the dominant status it has today.
VSCode is good but as someone who’s been writing software for nearly 40 years, I really feel you’ve over doing the compliments by a long long way.
Compilers, operating systems, browser engines (unfortunately) and reverse engineering proprietary hardware/firmware are all significantly harder challenges than writing an IDE.
in fact there have been excellent IDEs around for decades before VSCode came along. Yes the industry lacked an LSP but that doesn’t mean that languages severs didn’t exist before then, there just wasn’t a standard before so everyone did their own thing.
Having built in terminals isn’t a new innovation either. That is and always has been the norm.
And most of the other accomplishments aren’t any more unique either (eg lots of software projects have monorepos).
It’s ironic that you say VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering when VSCode is dependent on so many pre-existing technology’s like Electron, web standards, GUI frameworks, compilers, operating systems, device drivers, etc. in the grand scope of the engineering, VSCode occupies a very small fraction of engineering effort and in a niche that was already crowded before it even entered.
Is it the best IDE on the market? some might think so. JetBrains certainly have their fans too. But even if it’s the “best”, it’s extremely hard to argue that it is that far ahead of the competition and that innovative to deserve the accolades you’re describing.
And I would rather say that Atom was an engineering feat in terms of that they developed Electron and tree-sitter.
One also has to take into account that Atom started long before VS Code so for sure the VS Code team could make much more informed decisions and learn from the "failures" of Atom. And things like TypeScript wasn't around when Atom started.
Admittedly this is a little bit of a nitpick (and I agree with your general sentiment re: VSCode devs benefitting from prior art) but for clarity's sake — Atom v1.0.0 was released mid-2015. TypeScript v1.0 was early 2014 and had been usable since 2012 pre 1.0.
They were very much contemporaries of one another, though obviously TS popularity has surged since 2017/2018.
Also, the Monaco code editor (a core component of VS Code) was started for the Azure Portal and then used by the IE Dev Tools experience for several years before Atom. VS Code didn't have Electron until after Atom, but they had a running start in several core component areas.
Honestly I’m not a fan of VSCode as a user. It’s too generic and lacks identity (too powerful to edit simple configs); it auto-updates every time I start it; it’s too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?
If my goal is to program in language X then I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about.
That being said, it’s very stable and performs well—I will give the devs a massive kudos for that. Also if I did a lot of NodeJS dev work it would probably classify as a proper IDE for that.
But all-in-all I would prefer something purpose-built with minimal configuration out the gate for development workloads (C/C++, Java, C#) and a more minimal editor (nano, vim, eMacs, notepad++, geany, etc) for editing configs.
These seems impression by somebody who's not a VSC user at all. Specifically:
> it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?
VSC provides, at all the (four) levels, both GUI and text-based configuration editing.
> JSON is ugly
You can't get any simpler than JSON. The VSC designers have actually been admirably pragmatic, and opted for JSON5-ish, which supports comments and terminal commas (in arrays).
> too powerful to edit simple configs
Editors are complex by nature; other editors are not different.
It is actually quite the opposite; one can edit a subset of options in the GUI, then observe the changed values only in the JSON editor.
> it auto-updates every time I start it
VSC updates once a month, plus once or twice for patch releases in-between. It auto-updates every time if one opens it two/three times per month.
Plugins do auto update, but one can disable this, if they want.
> I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about
There is no default configuration that satisfies all the users; this is not specific to VSC.
Actually, the extensions experience is probably the most polished out there, and this matters, because if one makes something easy to use, users will use that feature more.
JSON, as used in VSC, can be defined as "plain text file containing an object", as configuration files have a hash map as root-level object.
AFAIK the difference between JSON (as used in VSC) and a Javascript object are minimal (no quoting for keys, possibly minor other differences) and using a JS object should have significant advantages in order to replace a de-facto standard.
`Template literals ie- multiline strings without needing escape or newline characters is a signficant advantage of JS object over JSON`
some will argue that scripting would thus be possible if the config was simply JS but that is a rabbit hole both on the debate itself and then the potential compexlity of config; there are trade-offs for/against but not a settled matter IMO as there are major projects like neovim that support full fledged config scripting (in the case of neovim they allow use of Lua)
What I "like that much" is the pragmatism (which, again, I didn't write) of the choice to break the JSON standard and introduce features that are significant for configuration files (comments, essentially, and to a very minor extend, trailing newlines in arrays).
I've never seen Deco, but it's not an established standard. Based on the repository, it has no grammar and it even leaves details to the implementations (e.g. multi-line strings). The simplicity comes at a cost, for example, to represent leading whitespaces.
If one asks 10 developers which format they'd use, they'd choose 10 different ones, therefore a certain level of standardization is required.
As far as I know most configuration can be done through GUI. You have both JSON and GUI views of the preferences. It seems the GUI is automatically generated from the JSON-schema that validates and gives autocomplete to the JSON editor.
VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.
It's sad that you were downvoted for this because you are not wrong at all. VS Code GUI config is a mess, and a lot of the settings are not available there. I just got used to messing with the JSON autocomplete.
> it’s too complicated to configure; JSON is ugly and it’s 2022, why not favor GUI configurations?
GUIs can change layout and users have to spend time learning where things are. Someone who is using a text editor is probably comfortable editing text.
Well unfortunately that’s a typical assumption developers make. “It’s an editor, Bob! The users ought to know how to read JSON!” Well thought-out UIs actually help the user find things and they don’t need to change all the time.
Unfortunately, even though we engineer with code, reading long streams of text is actually a terrible user experience by itself.
Good user experience should hold the user’s hand through the process so they don’t need to sift through a haystack of configurations.
VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.
VSCode isn't the most complex of projects or most widespread etc. But from perspective of engineering a large project is about making 100s of small and large choices. In hindsight, lot of them are wrong. Take any software WinNT, Linux, Atom, IntelliJ, Adobe* you can now with all the extra information available today can find some decisions that were wrong.
With VSCode these wrong decisions are very few and minor compared to the brilliant choices made by the team. That's why it is right to cite it as an engineering excellence project.
The software you mentioned were pioneers in their category. On the other hand, VSCode had the benefit of learning from the many IDES in the saturated market that came before it. If VSCode was one of the first IDE it would not look anywhere near the same because it wouldn't be able to lean on the lessons of past IDEs like it does today.
Indeed; while VSCode is held up as the "best ever IDE for everything, period", what those people gloss over is that they are web devs, not C++ hackers who need to be able to easily build projects (and have good, reliable syntax highlighting and autocompletion). In the rare occasion that I use VSCode for C++ development, I just use cmake from the built-in terminal because I really don't think VSCode is designed to build C++ projects.
VSCode is not tied to a specific language so the job of handling config files is left to the extension. Not every language has a fixed project structure so I think the major extensions have kept structure-dependent things out. In C++ for example there are CMake projects and GNU Makefile projects. Not sure why such extensions haven't bubbled yet.
Other IDEs have their own fixed project structure and a project config file specific to their IDE. This means running and debugging is easier in their IDE if your project works in the specific way intended by the IDE, but this locks you to their IDE.
By your logic Sublime is an even higher feat of engineering since it made even better engineering decisions.
Ultimately they’re both very fancy text editors, not ‘the greatest feat of modern software engineering’.
I’d happily switch from Sublime to VScode or EMacs or any of the other umpteen code editors. I’d shudder to have to go back from Git to SVN. Even Mercurial seems milquetoast in comparison.
What are some of the Git features that make a big difference to you? I use them on different projects and I end up using them both in the same very basic way (check out code, make changes, check code in).
All git operations are several times faster than their SVN counterparts, and git is more storage efficient as well. This becomes especially relevant for larger repositories.
Subversion merging has mostly been fixed. I haven't really noticed much difference between the two systems.
One place where Subversion historically did better with respect to merging is avoiding merging by allowing you to lock files. We use this with some binary files in our repository. About a year ago Git added similar functionality but I haven't had the chance to try it yet.
Well, it has to have something beyond price if it's taking by storm the editor arena that always has had great editors.
I think it has gained its place in the eternal emacs vs vim discussion, and that's a feat to be reckoned. In 15 years there will be other fancier editors but VS Code will still be there.
VS Code is good, but not THAT good. It has unparalleled remote editing with the SSH extension, but the actual editor is beaten by Sublime.
I can buy that people like it, I don’t dislike it, but it also isn’t sliced bread. There’s peers in the market that are ahead in various ways, so VS Code isn’t the end all be all, even if it is cool.
As a vim user with only superficial emacs experience, does emacs have something like the remote file system setup that VS Code with the ssh extension provides? Basically local editor with local response time, but file system is external?
I realize sshfs provides something similar, but it has a few rough edges compared to the vs code implementation.
I hesitate to dive into comparing editors, but here goes. I've used editors for a very long time, I believe the first was TECO sometime in the 1970s at the time I stopped punching cards. My preferred editors now are Emacs, Neovim, Jet Brains IDEs, and VSCode (in that order). All of them are really great professional grade tools.
Emacs supports editing remote files via ssh, ftp, or scp; one simply refers to filenames like: /ssh:host:filename or /ssh:user@host:filename. It's pretty simple and transparent. One can browse remote directories, etc.
Likewise editing a local file under a different user id is also supported using paths that look like /sudo::filename.
See section 18.5 Remote Files in the Emacs user manual[1].
Yes, when you're editing a remote file, using commands to access a shell or browse directories will open a shell in the remote system/browse remote directories- it all feels the same as working with local files.
Something I have yet to try is using an lsp server with a remote project. I'm not sure how some, like the rust lsp, that need the whole project (at least w/ emacs it doesn't yet support isolated files), would work.
> Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn.
The VSCode team didn't have to make Electron. They got to use it, though. Along with the various lessons learned by the Atom project.
I think VSCode's impressiveness is less about the pure engineering challenge (although I do think even among popular, well-used IDEs there's a large differential in things like performance, which points to it not being a trivial problem), and more about making smart product decisions to strike a great balance between extensibility and performance / smoothness. There's not a singular big hairy problem to solve, but if you compare VSCode to other Electron apps, it's clear that the VSCode team really took the time to make sure everything was as performant and polished as possible.
And in terms of "well it depends on other technologies for it to work", this describes pretty much any innovation in software since the very earliest computers, including all the examples you listed.
Sure, we do all stand on the shoulders of giants. But the other things I listed requires significantly more research and development effort than building an IDE does.
Also I dispute that VS Code is the quickest editor out there. It’s faster than its Electron counterparts but that’s a pretty low bar. This isn’t a dig at VS Code, it’s my default IDE (well that and vim). But the largest part of the reason I use VSCode is because it’s free.
That, for me, is its real advantage. But that’s not an engineering achievement.
I agree that it is an exaggeration to call it the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. Still there are many technologies that are well liked but haven't developed in many years. There are many technologies that are here today but severely limited. And there are many technologies which promises potential for something better in the future. There are very few pieces of software that are here today and ticks a lot of the boxes of computer science. That are open source, cross-platform, extensible and has a modern stack.
> browser engines (unfortunately)
I often wish it wasn't so but the reality is that a shit ton of development has gone into browsers and in many cases other areas just aren't comparable. Even more so considering most resources go into proprietary technologies.
As as side note reverse engineering hardware can certainly be very hard. It is also something that can gather far more credit than it probably should compared to actually engineering a solution in the first place.
> There are very few pieces of software that are here today and ticks a lot of the boxes of computer science. That are open source, cross-platform, extensible and has a modern stack.
Open source: there’s loads. I’m very surprised to read that comment here of all places. But even if we take your comment at face value, licensing has naff all to do with engineering impressiveness.
Cross platform: again I’d beg to differ there there aren’t many. And again I’d also like to point out that something not being cross platform doesn’t negate it being impressive engineering.
Extensible: this is another metric you’ve added that I disagree is a requirement
Used a modern stack: this absolutely shouldn’t matter when one talks about “of all time” like the GP was. Otherwise you’re intentionally skewing the results to only include recent developments.
> I often wish it wasn't so but the reality is that a shit ton of development has gone into browsers and in many cases other areas just aren't comparable.
The point of the GPs tangent was comparing all software engineering.
Sure, if you say VSCode is the greatest software engineering project of all time then suffix that comment with a dozen footnotes describing a dozen exclusions to the scope, then the claim might be more reasonable. But that wasn’t what the GP said and nor is it then “greatest”.
Frankly though, I wouldn’t even extend that description of his to modern IDEs specifically, let alone the broader context they intended.
>I really feel you’ve over doing the compliments by a long long way.
Well, that shows the bar for Web Developers these days are so low, that even VSCode could even be on the list of "one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time."
Web developers are so abstracted away from everything, their understanding of computing and software is really hurting the industry. And the sad part is not only are they the majority in software development, they are also the most well paid and vocal.
I dunno, I'm not convinced that a compiler or OS is a harder problem than an IDE. "Turns out humans are complicated and making computers do things they want is hard."[1] UX design is not only a whole complicated field in its own right, it imposes additional technical constraints that interlock with UX ones in complex ways. (E.g., VS Code's plugin API is architected the way it is partly to limit the ability of a plugin to accidentally add latency in the places that are most critical for usability, or otherwise undermine the editing experience.)
Obviously some compilers and OSes and IDEs are larger in scope than others, but all else being equal, if I had to pick one to write and it was really important to deliver something good, I'd rather do one of the former.
(This applies to any kind of GUI program that needs to be very feature-rich in order to meet the needs of power users, and where user productivity is at a premium because those users spend all their time in it. IDEs are just the subcategory of that that we as programmers most often use.)
I think a "compiler" isn't too bad — certainly easier than an IDE by a long margin. An optimizing compiler OTOH, can be a bit of a beast. Because the optimization passes self-interact, on every line of code, repeatedly, any small error in the passes can dramatically amplify (or cancel out!). It means the level of quality of the optimization passes is (by necessity) much, much, much higher than plain old SW. It's just ... very tedious.
It seems like not really an apples-to-apples comparison anyway. Designing a text editor, there are just a lot more subjective questions.
The technical issues are also sort of different, fixing latency problems is a totally different type of problem that developing a framework for how an optimizing compiler should do its thing. Both valuable and hard things to do, hard to come up with a metric to rank them.
> In fact there have been excellent IDEs around for decades before VSCode came along.
I wonder what everyone's favorite IDE is. I don't think I could put my finger on a single one and claim that it's the best.
I really liked Lazarus (for Pascal), because it's perhaps one of the snappiest tools I've used for a language that also compiles pretty fast. Though it's certainly not as modern or smart as JetBrains products.
I rather liked NetBeans (for Java and PHP), because it's truly free and can be relatively lightweight. The interface doesn't feel overbearing either, you get some framework/library support out of the box and even projects like jMonkeyEngine built upon NetBeans for their game engine editor. It's like libre JetBrains lite, but struggles with larger projects.
I rather liked MonoDevelop (for C#), because it felt like the .NET equivalent of NetBeans, was lightweight, functional and just worked without getting too much into your way. That said, it never really got as much attention as other products in the space (Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider).
I acknowledge the success of Eclipse (for Java and other languages), because I've seen that platform be used for anything from being an IDE for programming, to niche modeling tools and graphical programs. Some also swear by its incremental compiler (for Java), but personally it feels sluggish to me (like running JetBrains IDEs with low RAM) and its stability is inversely proportional to how many plugins you have.
I acknowledge the success of Visual Studio (for .NET and other languages), because when your platform is a walled garden, you can make sure that the experience is focued on doing things within it decently (like XCode, I guess), even though sometimes the IDE felt similarly heavy to JetBrains offerings and was more opinionated towards what you can do with it, as well as the platform support.
I like JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ and their other offerings), because they have perhaps the best autocomplete and code refactoring/inspection tools out of any other solution out there. The plugin ecosystem is rich, the language support is pretty great, the experience across various languages is similar enough. Though the obvious downsides are large system requirements (you need enough RAM and project indexing is slow, having 6 Java projects open and 2 front end projects open is a pain), bad run configurations (that making sharing run configurations across Windows/Linux really hard because of interpreter selection for scripts etc.) and confusing menus (due to how much functionality there is, a bit like Visual Studio, though the menu structure changes for different IDEs from them as well). The benefits still outweigh the negatives and so I pay for all their tools.
I like Visual Studio Code as a text editor (for anything really), but it feels like some of the refactoring and code editing support is lacking, especially when working with enterprise codebases. You can get pretty close to a fully fledged IDE with it, but at that point you're also trading some of the performance and lighter footprint away. Regardless, most of my projects have a .workspace file in them and I use Visual Studio Code together with JetBrains products.
I like other attempts at feature filled text editors as well, be it Fleet (though was a bit too unfinished last I tried their preview), CudaText (really interesting project with lots of nice features) or anything else, really.
At the end of the day, there is no single best IDE, just different ones that are suited for different tasks.
Edit: actually decided not to include the nano vs vi/vim discussion, since that's not super relevant to the discussion. Either is fine, I like the simplicity of nano more.
I respect your experience and opinion, but you’re missing the point here.
VSCode delivered a fantastic user experience. It reached a product market fit other editors could only dream of (let alone any editor based on browser tech). This, must have required engineering smarts and very thoughtful collaboration between product and engineering.
Hard engineering = delivering the best possible outcome within tight constraints/requirements. I’m sure the VSCode team was trying to hit a very specific number in responsiveness, startup time and memory usage.
Yes, compilers fall in that category as well as modern chip manufacturing (single digit nanometer fab FTW!). Those folks are the unsung heroes. However, we cannot discredit the fantastic product experience of VSCode. It was not possible without some innovation, clever engineering and a well thought out architecture. (I am sure they learned from Atom’s failings)
Update:
> The VSCode team didn't have to make Electron. They got to use it, though. Along with the various lessons learned by the Atom project.
Yes! They are progressively a huge leap forward, built on the contributions of others before them. Now the VSCode framework has spawned a new generator of tools (such as Obsidian).
What people mean when they say “I can’t believe how good this is” is:
“I can’t believe how good this is for something I got for free”
That’s not engineering excellence. It’s just engineering; being given away as a loss leader.
Vscode is good and well maintained, but that’s because a lot of money is being spent making it so.
Enjoy it; there’s no harm in taking money people are giving away. …just don’t presume they’re either a) doing it for love, or b) going to keep doing it indefinitely.
It's not like commercial alternatives are automatically better though, see Visual Studio (some aspects of VStudio are still better than VSCode, but VSCode has caught up fast, and as IDE for multi-language projects it is already better - the only important feature that's still inferior in VSCode compared to VStudio is the debugger integration).
If the current 'trajectories' remain roughly the same, VSCode will leave Visual Studio entirely in the dust in a couple of years.
I think that's a pretty bad choice of comparison. For one, they're two products under the same company. Secondly, Visual Studio is a bit of a dinosaur that suffers (and somewhat benefits) from a long history so it's easy for the VSCode team to look at that and just trim the fat and correct mistakes. They also target somewhat different domains with Visual Studio having a longer history in C++ and VSCode being more geared towards web dev (yes I know it's widely used for other languages but web is the leader and obvious target). Visual Studio is also by far not the best in its class, using IntelliJ products side by side with Visual Studio is like night and day especially when it comes to C++. A better comparison for VSCode would be something like Sublime Text since it's in the same product space of "lightweight" code editors with a focus on web.
Yes, and when was the last time a large room of new developers told you how amazed they were at how great Emacs was? How easy it was to setup vim plugins? How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?
Literally never would be my answer.
People like vscode because of the time and effort that has been spent making it friendly and approachable, yet still powerful.
Those are not just things that magically happen.
They didn’t happen because it’s free.
Those are things you get from a paid product team that prioritises issues, ux, etc. and a company that pays to implement them.
> How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?
It's pretty damn seamless with Vim. I code on a Mac these days, but was using Windows (w/ WSL) and Ubuntu about 50/50 before that. The same Vim (neovim) config script followed me everywhere.
Agreed. Vim was probably the most seamless of any software. If all I could see was the vim window, I wouldn't be able to say whether it was running on Linux or Mac. I don't think it gets any better than that.
> Yes, and when was the last time a large room of new developers told you how amazed they were at how great Emacs was? How easy it was to setup vim plugins? How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?
This seems like a reflection of your environment. This has happened to me more than once with both Vim and Emacs (and not just at a Vim conference:-D). The environment at the time one was a C++ shop, another was a Ruby conference. For example people were amazed when they heard about how you can call vim APIs with Ruby!
Literally yesterday I set up Emacs on my new laptop, the Doom Emacs distribution. It took around 10 minutes overall.
The thing that surprises me most is the fact that people don’t want to learn the tools. I get the point that Emacs/Vim ecosystem is difficult to get used to because of well, multiple reasons. But it worths the time because these tools are amazing. You need to invest a couple of hours in Vim, probably some more in Emacs, but it’s just one time investment and then you have an instrument (or two) to rely on.
The thing to keep in mind with VS Code is that they built a new IDE on a rather humble platform, and somehow managed to leapfrog every other IDE in the market (for JS and Python anyhow) in terms of functionality while keeping performance good. It may not be a marvel of engineering, but it is a marvel for having strong product vision and top notch execution while also being well engineered.
It made me sad as well. It’s interesting that it did. I think it’s related to the fact that I read it in HN I guess, and what kind of commentary do I seek and enjoy when roaming around here. Although of course I respect the commenter’s opinion, and we can all politely disagree and have different points of view, for some reason when I read this one I felt a certain degree of sadness.
Of course, this is an earlier generation. But if the commenter is correct that VS Code is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time, then what the heck are we doing. And if the commenter is incorrect, then what the heck are we doing as a community in our duty to educate to the extent that the commenter doesn't realize that massive projects like this have been implemented, and continue to be implemented.
We have rockets that land by themselves, trucks making cross-country autonomous trips without intervention, multiple systems that can securely run arbitrary sandboxed code from anywhere in the world by simply typing a URL. I'd want someone to be excited not by an IDE for an IDE's sake, but what they can build with their IDE.
I think the point here is that there are two ways to measure impact. One is just a raw "how impressive is this code" score. In that case, self-landing rockets, self driving trucks, etc, all score much higher than VSCode.
On the other hand, an equally valid measure of impact is utility * number of people. While things like self-driving trucks are extremely cool, as of today their overall impact is quite small. VSCode impacts an enormous amount of people every single day and saves them a ton of time.
Well put. Though by that second metric, I'm not sure that the marginal utility of VSCode, relative to a world where Atom existed and was equally free and accessible, would place it in the highest echelon of widespread-utility-creating engineering marvels.
Visual Studio is right there. A lot of the features you love about VSCode are present in Visual Studio. But Visual Studio is a much more robust piece of software.
So while VSCode is nice, it's not even the most impressive piece of software bearing the Visual Studio branding.
"VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering" in a world where vi and emacs exist seems like a bit of an exaggeration, and I'm not even a fan of either (VS Code is my daily driver; I like my GUI editors and I like them to behave like normal apps on the platform I'm running).
Of course a lot goes on but pre-LSP and post-LSP are day and night. There is now a huge amount of serious language tooling that _isn't_ locked up into one or several editors.
Now some might point out that LSP-based stuff is, like, bloat. Sure, OK. But there's a lot of motivation to do work that can pay off across the board. So much language stuff was based off of random regexes! It's hard to overstate how much better of an editor situation we are in than 10 years ago.
This isn't even getting into VS Code offering a way for you to put... one? two? files into a git repo and have that mean that opening the editor will spawn a container, _install itself in the container_, and run there while still having a native GUI for the actual usage of the tool. So much incidental complexity, gone!
One might point out that containers are a "big ball of mud" solution, but I vastly prefer that to big setup scripts that only half work. Here's to hoping we can shrink the ball of mud.
LSP is nice, but it's not an engineering marvel. It's just a text protocol. It's not even a great text protocol; it's okay, but not great. There's been lots of "LSP-like" protocols over the years, even decades, it's just that none of them really became a standard (partly because no one actually invested the time in writing one, and it just used an "ad-hoc protocol"). And of course the general concept of "process A communicates with process B over a text protocol" is all around us.
Like I said, I like LSP, but a great exceptional feat of engineering it is not.
This applies to most of VSCode as near as I can tell.
The thing is it successfully had work put in so that it’s a standard. “They did a thing that basically no one succeeded in doing” is, imo, proof of something.
I don't think anyone tried to really make a standard, as far as I know. But even if they did, there's lots of reasons why some things take off and others don't: putting in the work as you mentioned, whether it's any good, marketing, state of other tooling and tech, zeitgeist at the time ("timing"), etc.
Would something like Go have taken off 20 years ago? I'm not so sure, the zeitgeist at the time was very much in the direction of dynamic languages. And would Python take off if it was released today? Not so sure about that either.
But you know, putting in the work to write down a specification isn't really a marvel of engineering. It's ... just putting in the work.
> But you know, putting in the work to write down a specification isn't really a marvel of engineering. It's ... just putting in the work.
It's no marvel of engineering, but someone did put in the work, and others used it, more that can be said about many other things that might be "better engineered".
I never said they were "better engineered". I only wanted to refute that "VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time", which went to use LSP as an example in this (sub)thread.
I don't know what LSP is or why you'd think it's anything special or game-changing.
It just seems to be a generic interface to describe language bindings, which most text editors have.
In practice it's mostly a bad thing because any advanced language has special needs which will end up difficult to address by funneling everything through a common interface.
It is a generic interface which also helps with many capabilities, including proper refactoring, formatting, and the like. Since VSCode does so much through it, basically all nontrivial interaction with the code base can also be used in other editors.
A far cry from the days of sublime text’s regex-based autocomplete
Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity. With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment for that language ready to go. This is light years ahead of the traditional editors, and saves many hours of time.
Not to mention that VSCode has countless other productivity boosters built in which would require plugin hunting or fiddling with configuration files for Vim and Emacs.
> Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity.
For me you are 100% correct. In either vim or emacs I am at least 10 times more productive than I would ever be in VSCode. No comparison.
> Not to mention that VSCode has countless other productivity boosters built in which would require plugin hunting or fiddling with configuration files for Vim and Emacs.
First, there are distributions of both vim and emacs that come bundled with sets of plugins, if that is the sort of thing you like.
Second, some people enjoy customizing their editor to work exactly the way they want to. You obviously prefer the "set up out of the box" experience, and that is totally fine. Others boost their productivity by customizing their tools. Different people work differently.
Everyone else is not like you. That doesn't make their preferences invalid.
I have known many developers over the years who use both editors, and are extremely productive using their tool of choice. I am certain many of them would not be more productive using VSCode - it simply does not offer them anything significant enough to them to make that big of a difference.
VSCode's out-of-the-box configuration is better suited for the most common modern development contexts (probably?) and its customization, add-on and overall UIs are definitely more aligned with modern conventions, more readily accessible and more exploration-friendly.
But VSCode is also less responsive, more resource heavy and ultimately less flexible or extensible. Vim and emacs have more of a learning curve, and their configuration is more fiddly, but the biggest hurdle is probably that the interfaces they use for this predate modern GUI conventions. Notably the "search by keyword, click install, done" workflow for adding extensions is definitely standard behavior in emacs (and vim too, I assume).
Configuration fiddling aside - and that shouldn't be a daily activity - "Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity" is a claim that does not hold up to scrutiny. In the hands of an expert user, emacs (and again, I assume vim too) is definitely more capable and productive than VSCode. I'm fairly confident this could be demonstrated objectively. They just _do more_ and can be made to do it _exactly the way you want_ them to. The learning curve for vi/vim and emacs represents an investment, but one that can pay off handsomely.
The topic of this thread is actually a perfect example of one of the major advantages of these "classic" editors. Atom - and countless editors that have come before - has been sunset. And it will eventually happen to VSCode too. Your Atom customization skills (and mine) are wasted. Now we need to pick up a new editor and climb a new learning curve. But vim or emacs mastery is a skill you'll literally be able to use for the rest of your career.
It's absolutely valid to decide that learning how to use these esoteric tools well is not worth the effort to you personally, but there _is_ a reason these tools have been around for nearly half a century.
You’re definitely not coming in to this having much familiarity with the ecosystem of either other tool. Distributions like LunarVim, Spacemacs, and Doomemacs exist that fill that gap between the basic terminal editors and a ready-for-anything experience. Think, open a source file and get the language server auto detected and suggested for installation, right in vim.
Not to mention IntelliJ which I can’t help but keep coming back to after repeatedly getting frustrated enough trying to adopt VSCode. The git tooling in VSCode’s marketplace is a far cry from what’s available for some of these other tools. Fortunately for me, Fleet (new editor aimed at VSCode segment) is maturing at a rapid enough pace that I’ll likely be able to migrate to it in months/weeks and hopefully have a more zen experience.
>With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment
Very minor feature. It is not usefull unless you are constantly hunting for new languages.
>Not to mention that VSCode has countless other productivity boosters built in which would require plugin hunting or fiddling with configuration files for Vim and Emacs.
This is only true if you are comparing default vim/emacs to VSCode, which would be quite unfair. Compare it to some vim/emacs distributions and list the differences.
> Moreover it is supported out-of-the-box in emacs: `M-x list-packages`.
Or just use the menu; click on "Options” → “Manage Emacs Packages”. No need to scare people with “M-x” weirdness right out of the gate when it isn’t necessary since the option is right there in the menu.
Menus? Clicking? That doesn't seem very emacs-y of you. M-x weirdness - up to and including the fact that it refers to a "Meta" key not found on modern keyboards - is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that allows me to feel superior for knowing how to exit emacs gracefully.
But seriously you raise a good point. The OS-native menus in aquaemacs and similar go a long way toward making emacs more accessible and explore-able.
No joke, it is legitimately hard for a newbie to figure out how to close emacs, which is pretty ridiculous. (It's `C-x C-c` btw, but I honestly don't know how a first-time user could figure that out on their own without a menu. You need to be _told_. It's absolutely crazy that you need to consult the manual to know how it exit the program.)
EDIT: It looks like this thread is too deep for me to post a genuine reply, but just to respond to the "it's just plain emacs too" comment. Good point, and I was aware of that but I didn't know what to call the plain-vanilla Windowed/GUI-enabled emacs. I guess it's just "emacs". I actually hesitated on naming aquaemacs for exactly this reason, which is why I hedged with "or similiar".
To be clear, I’m not talking about the menus in some special Emacs port like aquamacs, I mean the regular Emacs, with its menu bar, seen here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/
I think it actually helps to present M-x to new people as being the "command palette" for Emacs. A modern starting Emacs setup should have a vertical completion setup and fuzzy matching, so hitting M-x and a few keys gives you a list of matching commands with their documentation next to them.
It’s also supported out of the box in SublimeText, though probably not as extensive as VSCode. Code completion, for example, is more like guessing in SublimeText. Though I can’t imagine either emacs or VSCode to respond as quickly to input as SublimeText, which is one of the reasons it will remain the text editor of choice for me. At least when writing some code in Lua.
I appreciate that perspective. Launching quickly and no input latency are probably my base demands from a text editor. Not sufficient, but necessary. I may need to give Sublime a closer look.
FWIW you _can_ get emacs to launch as quickly as, say, vi, and to respond to input as quickly as just typing in the terminal (but in my experience the default GUI doesn't have noticeable input latency):
* `emacs -nw` will launch emacs in a terminal rather than a OS-native GUI window. This has surprisingly little impact on the interface or usability, but it does make cosmetic tweaks like font-rendering more difficult.
* `emacs --daemon` will start an "emacs server" process running in the background, and `emacsclient` will connect a UI instance to it (so you don't need to re-process all your .emacs stuff each time)
That said you can probably introduce a lot of input latency by hooking a slow method to the keypress event, but that applies to Atom and VSCode as well as emacs. But all three of them seem to do OK suggesting auto-completions of one kind or another, which must be handled on keydown or similar, so maybe that's not as critical as I assume.
I usually have a text editor open all the time anyway (recently Atom, lately VSCode) so the time-to-launch isn't that big of a deal in practice (and isn't _that_ large to begin with) but I am disproportionately, irrationally annoyed every time I need to wait for the editor to start.
>>With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment
> Very minor feature. It is not usefull unless you are constantly hunting for new languages.
The big advantage isn't just installing but keeping them up to date without any actual effort. I used to know vimscript, used to understand how the vim package managers I used works and all. With VSCode I don't even know in which language are extenssions written.
I work mostly on golang, and now the environment is certainly more stable, but I remember that in order to have go extensions working on vim I used to have to be updating manually the extensions pretty much every release and it was some effort. Now I update the golang version and things just work.
I do agree the Vim plugin ecosystem (and vimscript) sort of sucks. That said, I've been using Vim for 20+ years and generally only mess with my config and plugins once every 2-3 years at most. Since the thing is just supposed to edit text, why would I feel compelled to update them, much less try to figure out what language they're written in?
> I work mostly on golang, and now the environment is certainly more stable, but I remember that in order to have go extensions working on vim I used to have to be updating manually the extensions pretty much every release and it was some effort. Now I update the golang version and things just work.
Most of that is because the Go ecosystem moved ahead. Five years ago something like vim-go would depend on maybe 15 different binaries that operated on the source code. Automatically updating all of that is possible, but somewhat slow and tricky (especially because there were no modules yet, so had to "go get -u" all these different binaries to check for updates).
Now, it's basically just gopls. You don't even need vim-go any more; just Vim + $any_lsp + gopls gives a very similar experience.
If we're talking about professional tools i'm not sure if setting it up as fast as possible is the best productivity comparison. All good tools need getting to know them, and setting things up yourself (eg. in vim) means you also know how to fix any issues that pop up in the future. Installing a vscode plugin for playing around is great, but it doesn't automatically make you a professional and stable production environment.
On the contrary, working in a professional environment, almost no one I know is using vim or Emacs seriously day to day for coding. We all use VSCode because that is a tool that just works for our team and company. Having a unified tool set works wonders for group productivity, no more messing around with some employees not having a certain package and others needing to customize their vim configs. No, everything simply works, and we can focus on the actual coding rather than messing around with our configs.
My experience of VSCode _is_ messing around with my config, but giving up and going back to a more mature editor because I could never get it to do what I wanted. I suppose capitulation was also an option, but I dislike the characterisation of tooling as something other than ‘actual coding’.
That's very strange, when did you use it? And what config did you need? In our company there really isn't any config we mess around with, just download the language plug-ins and that's it. If someone wants to add more then that's fine but not required.
I have a setup that I maintain and I pop back to it every six months or so. There are probably three classes of things that end up turning me off.
1) VSCode is very UI heavy and doesn’t allow consistent keyboard and text navigation. I want my text editor to be text-based, and it slows me down to have different types of windows (some of which seem impossible to hide permanently) with inconsistent forms of navigation.
2) The terminal window is its own thing, even if you open it in an editor window, which is then ignored by anything that interacts with the terminal. This is more what I want but is very limited and immature:
The lack of an infrastructure like Emacs comint mode also means there’s no good text-based database mode either. I want the same navigation, search and editing functions in every single window I have to interact with.
3) Where analogues to Emacs modes exist, they are universally less featureful, often because of fundamental limitations of the VSCode extension API. REPLs do less and offer less programmability. Edamagit is a fine and welcome effort but not as good as Magit.
If people want an editor with a little bit of auto completion and some squiggly lines to tell them they’ve typed something wrong VSCode is great. I have many mostly happy VSCode users within my organisation. But I think every individual programmer, like every team, should have a regular little retrospectives with themselves. What work did I do today, what would have made it flow better? In every case, I can build that in Emacs, but it’s much more friction in VSCode. This is partly immaturity and partly the APIs not offering as much. Long term I’m rooting for VSCode because it’s snappy and has undeniable market share. But it’s never quite been there for me yet.
Sounds like junior web devs working on Javascript pull-in-the-whole-internet code bases. Not criticising your choice, it might be the best solution to your specific challenges; that just does not sound like the environment I work in. If somebody can't configure their own editor and its dependencies, I wouldn't trust them to handle application dependencies in the supply chain either.
Then again, I might pre-date the which editor to use and how to configure it era.
For seniors, sure that makes sense, use whatever editor you want, but for onboarding juniors, we definitely have a recommended toolset just so we can make sure there aren't incompatibilities and that their productivity is still high, ie having a debugger when needed, using code completion, error checking, linting tools etc.
My point is you could configure all this stuff in Vim or Emacs but it's not as straightforward plus it wastes time when onboarding. We'd rather have an IDE like experience.
I don't understand, what config is necessary to work on the same codebase? Whatever program I use to open source code, eg. emacs or vscode, shouldn't matter should it?
The only time I ever had to use vscode working with other programmers was for pair programming, using the vscode sharing thing. Apart for that, not being able to use emacs would be a deal breaker - using other editors is like wading through quicksand for me.
It's not just the code, we'd want everyone on the team to use the appropriate toolsets including debugging and error checking support. They can set it up in Vim and Emacs if they want but it saves time for the team as a whole if we all use a standardized set of tools.
Yes, that makes perfect sense. If they want to set up an alternative editor, doing it on their own time is a reasonable expectation. No question vscode is millions of times easier for juniors.
These kinds of hyperboles are really really bad. You are stating that if it took 1 minute to install a plugin and get to work in vscode, it would take 694.4 days to do the same in other editors? Please use reasonable numbers if you are trying to make a valid point.
Not just 'other editors', I was thinking about emacs specifically. I think my point was fairly obvious. Maybe not a million times, but probably hundreds. Vscode and other modern editors use key combinations everyone knows by default, eg. C-q, C-c, C-v, etc., have gui directory browsing- so there is essentially no learning curve.
It takes weeks (at least) using emacs/vim until text editing/movement starts to pay off. There's no learning curve for `M-x package-install`, but if there is some variable that needs to be customized, like the path to an executable or something, that's a whole rabbit hole to go down, and at some point you need to learn lisp or you'll waste a lot of time being confused by errors.
During the only programming course I took in college, one in which emacs was required, I spent as much time learning emacs as anything else (it was also the most valuable thing I learned so I'm grateful in the long run).
> Having a unified tool set works wonders for group productivity, no more messing around with some employees not having a certain package and others needing to customize their vim configs.
Completely agree: the entire company should be on a common, future-proof, extensible, free platform: Emacs!
I honestly don’t understand why anyone bothers wasting effort on any other editor.
Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival.
Great tools are obvious in their base functionality and have optional additional layers that can be discovered if necessary. When you have to search the web to find out how to close the editor you just opened, because it works differently than every other program running on your system, you know you're using a bad tool.
No, good tools absolutely require learning how to use them.
To think that they don't is a maddening take because it has led to the infantilization of applications in so many areas of the software world.
There is definitely a place for simplistic tools that have no customization, no configuration, a single limited way to do anything and no hooks/APIs to modify their internal behavior. Yes, such tools are easiest to pick up and casually use in the limited way they can be used and that's often all that is needed.
But, the world also need professional tools. In the non-software world this is obvious and such tools exist in every profession. Even your hammer example is wrong as the sibling post noted, there are "professional hammers" (nail guns) that require a bit more care to use but are much better.
There is a place for test lights (that anyone can touch to a wire to see if there's voltage). But we can also buy voltage meters of increasing complexity and capabilities. They start to require a little bit of understanding of volts and amps and ohms, but they are so much more useful. But yes you need to learn a little to use them. There are also things like oscilloscopes which an untrained person wouldn't stand a chance to know how to use at first sight. But of course they are vastly more useful once you learn the tool.
Just one random example of thousands. Yes, good tools absolutely require training.
>Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival.
You mean like a nail gun? The kind that all professional roofers use?
Considering that nails from a nail gun have a habit of following the grain in surprising ways (possibly causing the nail to do a 180 degree turn and find your finger), yes, it is important for a prospective user to "get to know it".
Step inside a woodworking- or machine shop sometime and see how many of tools there you can instantly use with proficiency, with no instruction. (Please stand back from the table saws while trying this experiment.)
It’s wonderful and beautiful that we can get real work done with a heavy thing on a stick, but pretending every tool can be as simple as a hammer is not really arguing in good faith.
I’ve seen so many people use a hammer wrong. They don’t swing it effectively, hold it too high on the handle, or even use the wrong type of hammer for the job (yes, there are different types of hammers designed for different types of hammering).
And that’s before you go into all the other technologies invented that are evolutions of the hammer, from nail guns to jackhammers.
So any tool that is complicated enough to use that it requires more than 5 minutes to understand can't be a good tool? That is just false.
Obviously vim is not the tool for you (and emacs probably isn't either). You don't like the way they work, so don't use them. They are not bad tools. They are both very good tools. They are just not tools that fit your preferences. They do fit other people's preferences.
There are more complex problems than "nail" requiring more complex tools than "hammer".
And even the hammer metaphor falls apart pretty quickly: compressor driven nail guns are commonly used.
VSCode is obviously has something going for it, else so many people wouldn't be using it. Vi and Emacs are also extremely popular and have been for decades.
This is completely wrong. Basic tools that solve basic tasks are easy to learn and understand.
I use spectrum analyzers to identify partial discharges in high voltage equipment. Sometimes I use a hammer.
One of them require deep knowledge, with the other one I just give the equipment a whack with to see where the fault lies.
An operating theatre is filled with tools that require decades to master and years to learn to use originally. Even if you forget the surgeon's skill there is still the likes of ECMO (run full time by a perfusionist), EMG/NCS (an electrophysiologist) or the old classic, an anaesthetic machine (anaesthetist). Many of the UIs on these are, to the outside eye, downright janky.
Good tools usually have a beneficial tradeoff - it takes a minute or two to learn how to do it, but you have recurrent measureable gains in productivity after that. That includes closing Vim.
I wouldn't put it that blunt but I do agree. The problem are these nerds with seemingly infinite memory. It is almost impossible for them to make a UI for the rest of us.
I tried editing a txt document in vim one time. After gazing at the UI for much to long I had to ask for help because it wouldn't let me edit the txt.
I'm sure your average vim wizard can see no wrong in forcing new users to learn how to engage edit mode by pressing 12 keys simultaneously.
They simply dont get that our brains are like bookshelves that take only n books. If you push more than that onto the shelve other books are falling off on the other side.
I could certainly learn some of vim's functionality but there would be very little disk space left to write the software. I'm seriously more productive using MS notepad or nano. I can totally see myself forget how to engage edit mode in a week or 2. I'm having visuals of picard ordering enterprise to engage
All i need is a shuttle!
The edit mode feels like a child safety feature where I'm the child.
Human children flying Vulkan space ships, think about it.
If non of this makes sense, that is the whole point.
>It is almost impossible for them to make a UI for the rest of us.
Have you considered that their tool is not necessarily made for you? You'd shudder at emacs yet there's still people there that really want it over vim and are more productive with it than most vim and vscode users.
>I'm sure your average vim wizard can see no wrong in forcing new users to learn how to engage edit mode by pressing 12 keys simultaneously.
it's 1 key. It's not intuitive by default tho that's very much true.
>They simply dont get that our brains are like bookshelves that take only n books. If you push more than that onto the shelve other books are falling off on the other side.
If you use a tool every day you're often expected to know a bit about it regardless of which one you use.
The previous poster compared it to a hammer and someone else mentioned a nailgun.
Similarly a an ax is simple but a chainsaw used more plenty by my father...but he knows how to replace and fix the chain, And even beyond that a nailgun and chainsaw are simple simple machines compared to the tooling you'll find in many workshops.
If you processed wood professionally you'd use room filling machinery instead to make boatloads of planks and whatnot in no time.
The thing is. Much of these issues one would encounter with em and things to know them are relatively simple and easy on their own... But seem difficult if you don't know. They're pretty easy to forget if you do it once. But if you've done it dozens of times you just know. Knowing these things doesn't impact the person's ability to learn other related things much. How a new kind of wood to cut behaves or whatever in the same way that remembering that new face and name doesn't obviously directly makes me forget my existing coworkers.
The key for learning a profession is to dump as much knowledge as possible into your 'muscle memory'. there are many operations in emacs and vi that i can do when i want to, but i might not be able to pull up the key sequence to tell someone. Like a musical instrument, the key is practise, practise, practise.
I don't feel like i have proficiency in a language until i have forced myself to speed run a few projects in it. The ideas are important, but it is the ingrained habits that keep the code clean and consistent.
I mean if you don't want to spend so much time studying a given profession, of course. But the neural positioning of generating this text, or transform this text' is different than the neural positioning of 'should this call to this new to me gRPC server be blocking? Timeout? Retries?'
The latter takes thorough focus. the former can be done by muscle memory with practise, and the limit is more on how many new things your fingers can learn in a month, the total of learned things can be quite high.
Reading such posts really makes me wonder how people wrote UNIX (up to V7) with just ed and an ASR33. And productive, they were.
I've seen some old timers on ACME who dislike even the "distraction" of syntax coloring with modern editor such as vim. I wonder how they would fare with something like MS VSCode.
Don't underestimate the complexity of software built in the seventies either for the business, financial or scientific world. We already had virtual machines, HA, realtime and distributed computing back then.
Some code running at CERN or NASA was far more complex than a bluetooth stack, yet was also written with teletypes or ADM-3A style terminals.
As someone who has worked on both sides of the coin in the finance world in consumer credit processing, I think the person you are replying to is more right than wrong, but it's also a matter of how you view the idea of complexity.
I've worked on 30+ year old systems where the code base is absolutely immense, but the <complexity density> of this stuff is very, very low on average compared to the magical bullshit that happens on a simple UI render of some template react app in 2022.
Folks had very little in the way of abstractions at their fingertips, and the languages themselves weren't nearly so helpful in helping you manage complexity, so applications were usually long, shallow, and operating under a litany of fixed boundaries that define and drive a significant amount of behavior for you.
The biggest source of complexity was having to manage your own unique `personal operating system` of bespoke resources at any given time, where each developer was carved into an incomplete walking repository of both business processes and software practices with the passing of each year.
To put it more simply, software can't be more simple in aggregate because we can trivially rely on insanely complex components others have built and made available. Components which were simply not available back then.
Yes, the glue on top might be trivial, but even that frequently isn't.
And if anything breaks down, the humans at the top are normally expected to handle it, no matter where in the stack it is.
I admire what people built with stone tools, but at the end of the day, a modern skyscraper is a marvel of complex engineering with no rival in that world.
I'm not saying that NASA or CERN people were dumb or anything, they were probably smarter than the average dev today. But even a genius can only go so far with limited tools.
An elite slinger from the Roman times will probably lose at least 8/10 against a Russian mobilized soldier with 2 weeks of training, armed with an AK-47.
That's how progress works, we both learn ourselves, and more than that, we make powerful and accessible tools.
Having worked with a handful of terminal CLI purists I'm convinced most of the people who bang the drum hard for vi and emacs aren't nearly as productive as they think they are, and instead evangelize it largely for some mixture of these reasons:
1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation
2) It serves as a cultural cachet, or shibboleth, to signal how elite and pure a developer they are
3) they wish to continue working in the same environment they have been for years or decades, and learning new key binds, trying to find equivalent features and testing new features isn't worth some potential benefit
Everything else, like differences in RAM consumed, total install size, etc seem like post-hoc metric seeking for folks who have already decided what they like.
I find that many people "banging the drum hard" for a text editor are falling for the same kind of faulty thinking.
In my experience, the only situations a colleague has been slowed down in a significant way by their choice of editor seem to boil down to two categories:
- Haven't put in the time to actually learn the tool (i.e. using vim purely in insert mode, or VSCode as a plain text editor, constantly going back to a file manager to find and open files) and get stuck in a particularly horrible workflow.
- Burn hours daily fiddling with their setup, chasing perfection.
Neither of these are typically caused by the tool itself. At the end of the day... I'm confident most devs can be quite effective using just DOS EDIT or Notepad if pressed.
As for me.... unless I'm doing something specialized, I catch myself trying to eke out that last 1% productivity boost from my editor and ask myself... is this really the best thing to be messing with? Usually, it's not. Honestly, writing documentation or doing a quick prototype is much higher return.
> 1) They have a strong preference for keyboard only operation
Sounds like having a strong preference for keyboard only to edit text and code is the natural way.
I don't think most vscode user are using mouse a lot either and if they do that, they are doing it the slow and inefficient way as vscode can be entirely piloted with the keyboard as well.
That is kind of a bad example, because installing extensions is something you do rarely. Making that easy is nice, but not a huge productivity win.
I think Emacs also has a lot of stuff for extensions and such built-in, but I'm not too familiar with Emacs. With Vim it's a bit more manual, but really not all that much work. Basically search "Vim $my_language", usually click the first link, "git clone" in your ~/.vim/pack, and you're ready to do for most plugins, which will work out of the box. That you need to spend "hours" on this is just nonsense.
And the last time I tried VSCode with Go I had to spend some time fiddling around with things to make it work too.
What it comes down to is personal preference. Some people prefer A, others B. I strongly dislike VSCode's default settings and need to spend quite a bit of time fiddling with that too. But ... I don't pawn off my preferred way of doing things as somehow objectively superior to anyone else's. There's just one person why needs to use your editor: you. So ... whatever works for you, ya know. I can't believe it's 2022 and we're still doing this "editor war" bullshit.
>With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a world-class development environment for that language ready to go.
Same with Emacs. `M-x package-install`, type, RET.
I think there's a difference in the approaches. Emacs (and vim though I use the former) is like an old multi tool that has been with you on every programming or technical journey you've ever made. Scars, patches, customizations and everything else. It fits like an old glove and in most (though not all) cases, this comfort and the resulting productivity is far greater than a new editor that does "everything right" out of the box.
But I don't want to click (or not even click) and install random stuff from the internet. It's a security, performance and stability risk. My editor should do what I tell it to, not go solo. While I understand your viewpoints, my priorities are just not aligned.
A whole bunch of people still prefer not to have an Appstores in their apps. It's not like this things are god given improvements. Time safer maybe.
People handle their Emacs config files like little shareable babies. That is not even on the same level as 'click and ready' fully unpersonalized environments.
emacs packages is basically the same UX, tho perhaps there are more packages a given person might want for a language. really most packages don't need much config for base functionality.
Vim and Emacs cannot compare to VSCode when it comes to productivity. With VSCode, you type the name of any programming language in the extension search, click "Install", and you have a huge security breach.
You can run vim and emacs in a gui app. I run neovim in neovide which imo is the best experience for vim these days. Vim's builtin terminal is good enough now that you can ditch running it inside tmux/terminal.
They're all terminal apps so I'm not sure why platform conventions would matter. Sure some people use GUI wrappers but most people primarily use them in terminals which have the same conventions everywhere, generally speaking.
Platform conventions matter because uniformity matters. It's a mystery to me why people just accept that in their (terminal) text editor, copying text uses a different shortcut than it does in their web browser. That is terrible usability, consumes brain cycles for no good reason, and is above all else completely unnecessary because modern alternatives exist that actually blend in with the system they're a part of.
> Platform conventions matter because uniformity matters.
There are tradeoffs to using software that has different shortcuts for similar things you might do in other software. Uniformity is nice, but I don't find it to be so essential that there is no room for any different ways of working.
> It's a mystery to me why people just accept that in their (terminal) text editor, copying text uses a different shortcut than it does in their web browser.
I don't think they "just accept" it. In the case of emacs (and I believe vim also), you can enable a CUA mode if you wish, and have keybindings that are more like the system. However, in my experience, users of both of those text editors (and indeed, I use both) often choose to use the normal keybindings of those editors intentionally. In my opinion, it doesn't "consume brain cycles for no good reason". There are two very different approaches between those two editors, both are perfectly reasonable and valid. The fact that "modern alternatives exist..." is not necessarily relevant. People have been using both of those editors for years, and they are well versed in how they work and can be very efficient using them. Suggesting that they should just switch to a modern alternative makes some broad assumptions. 1) That they would be happier using some "modern alternative". 2) That whatever value they get from using those editors with different keybindings pales in comparison to what they would gain from switching to an editor with bindings more consistent with the system.
I don't believe you can assume either of those things for most of the people who choose to continue to use either of those editors after working in them for a significant amount of time.
Don't get me wrong, I understand your viewpoint. It's just that not everyone finds that uniformity to be as important as you do.
I also think it is important to point out that both vim and emacs are in active development, so it is not as if either of them has been "mothballed". So while their user interface conventions are very different from much "modern" software, it is not as if they are abandoned -- both are still being developed. They obviously both have significant value to a lot of people.
This isn't even true on virtually any macOS terminal, which use Command-C (just like a web browser). The problem isn't the terminal, it is the operating system.
> Platform conventions matter because uniformity matters
Except just as you noted the conventions change across platforms, contexts and over time, so they aren't really uniform at all.
If you're moving between Windows, macOS, and Linux, or between GUI, command line and remote shell (either within or across any of these) you're already context switching on a regular basis. And if you stick around long enough an OS upgrade will come along that moves the window controls and menu buttons around so you need to retrain your muscle memory (and update your end-user documentation).
If anything some of the long-established, old-school conventions are probably _more_ uniform and consistent. E.g. in vi/vim `:w` will save and `:n` will jump to line n - always and everywhere. In a terminal `find . -name foo` will search the filesystem - (almost) always and everywhere.
That sort of thing isn't comprehensive (i.e. it doesn't cover action you'll need to take) but it's kinda nice when it's available. Maybe we'd be better off if select-then-middle-click worked for copy/paste everywhere.
You mean like yy versus ctrl+c? You can definitely use a Vim browser/OS extension but Vim does it that way because the creator, I suppose, perceived that his user interface is better than what's already there. And I tend to agree. I don't need uniformity if it'll be inefficient.
I have C-f mapped to Find and C-v mapped to Paste on vim. It’s trivial to do (one line per mapping) but yes I would be considered an heretic by some vim purists. They tend to go the other way around, using plugins to make their browser behave like Vim. Which makes more sense than it might seem; if you spend a lot of time on the command line vim bindings are better supported than ctrl c ctrlv
> It's a mystery to me why people just accept that in their (terminal) text editor, copying text uses a different shortcut than it does in their web browser.
M-x cua-mode resolves this in Emacs. I don't use it, because I've been using Emacs for slightly longer than the CUA has existed.
I appreciate you saying Emacs, and vi, but I don't think we even have to reach out of the Microsoft ecosystem to find an even great achievement of engineering for a productivity app; namely Excel.
vi and emacs have certainly had more impact to date, but at the current moment VSCode far outcompetes it on every front. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who still prefer vi or emacs, the same way that some people still ride horses despite the fact that cars exist.
You seem to be implying that VSCode is "better" than Emacs or Vim, as cars are better than horses, but other than having wider adoption atm, I'm not sure it's "better" in any meaningful way.
How many people believed the earth was flat at one point?
To be clear, I don’t care either way about vim or vscode. I use vim mode in vscode right now, but I might use something else later. All I care about is being able to work pleasantly.
What I meant is that numbers of people doing something is not proof for something being better.
For instance: How many people listen to Justin Bieber and how many listen to The Doors?
The claim was not that VSCode is a better editor than vim or emacs, but rather that "VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering". To me, the tool that matches that description is the one which most increases the productivity level for the most people. Emacs or Vim might be better at increasing the productivity of a single individual (super huge might here – I personally found VSCode improved my productivity much more than vim ever did), but once you multiply that out by the number of people impacted, I doubt there is much contest.
> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time.
It's not. It's not even the greatest piece of engineering to come out of Microsoft - that's probably Windows NT. But here are just a few examples of things I think are better:
* Millau Viaduct
* The Linux Kernel
* The Bugatti Veyron
* Pretty much any NASA Mars mission
That's not to say VSCode is a bad editior, it certainly isn't. But lets have some perspective.
I'd say compilers are the greatest productivity tool. Have you tried to program in assembly? it's doable, but there's a reason we work in higher languages most of the time.
>VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn.
Its good, but not that good. There are still some pretty basic features that full fledged IDEs have - like multi window/display setup. And before someone suggests opening another instance - no, that is not enough and creates some synchronization issues that are no-go.
It also handles huge files very badly - try opening up 1-2gb XML files. It will either ask for more RAM, and crash. Or open it and disable all formatting options. Mind you that other editors can handle such files.
Or try to do a complex multiline regex find and replace - it will just sometimes crash outright on bigger files.
I disagree, even I use it myself, for those reasons:
- plugins are a mess - when working with tech x how do I know from that huge list which plugins to use
- keyboard shortcuts don`t work out of the box in my Ubuntu system
- The ui feels non intuitive and overbloated to me - even IntelliJ Idea feels more clean and easy to use
- I would love if VSCode could detect the technologies my project uses and just install/use the proper plugins for me. And maybe even without asking me so I could be happily writing code, building, running tests and doing debugging right from the start wether it`s Rust, Kotlin + Spring Boot, Node + Typescipt whatever... sadly its not working like this...
> - I would love if VSCode could detect the technologies my project uses and just install/use the proper plugins for me
VSCode does this already, if it detects a new language it suggests installing a new plugin. I don't know the criteria it follows to recommend a plugin, perhaps it only does it with some official plugins, but it has showed me this a few times.
You are definitely over-hyping VS Code, but it definitely has a killer feature: being the only modern IDE (Sublime Text aside) that doesn't slow to a crawl when opening any file larger than a few hundred lines of code.
Qt Creator is what advise to newcomers who aren't yet familiar with the terminal.
Unlike VSCode, its C/C++ debugger is first class, and it's a native binary developed in a high efficiency language.
I've mostly switched over to VS Code from both vim and BBEdit, although I still use both somewhat regularly. It seems to me that VS Code is the 21st-century equivalent of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping — that is, an editor that does a lot at the cost of quite a few CPU cycles and more than a bit of RAM.
While Emacs isn't quite as heavyweight as it was 25 years ago (hooray for Moore's Law), it still makes me grin to see Emacs fans sneer at the resource usage of a modern Electron-based editor.
VS Code built on top of Atom’s team great work, which was open source (something that Microsoft was still grasping at the time). Not saying VS Code isn’t great, but they definitely learned from past projects mistakes and wins. Atom was one of the pioneers.
Electron in general continues to be a bloated memory hog and inefficient. I think the real interesting thing is how good it is despite the runtimes/frameworks they are using, not because of them. It's more an example of there's no such thing as the "right tool".
> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time.
I don’t know… things like vertically landing rockets, the Large Hadron Collider, inflating space stations, CRISPR, mRNA vaccines come to mind among many other things that surely surpass VS Code when it comes to engineering marvels.
I hold VSCode to be at least equal to those achievements. Having used dozens of text editors and IDEs in the course of my programming career, I can appreciate how non-obvious it is for a piece of software this complex to work so fucking well all the time.
And considering how many people are empowered by the productivity gains VSCode brings, I'd say that the real-world impact of VSCode is also much greater than that of most of the projects you listed. VSCode has probably saved hundreds of millions of hours for programmers over the past few years. It's almost impossible to come up with an appropriate comparison for how important it is.
You are saying an IDE (of which there are many wayyy better) is as equally important as a technology which helped save thousands of lives? Do you really think VSCode is an equally big achievement as building space stations?
peoples lives are more important than a few hours of a programmers life getting used to vim (or any other non VSCode editor)
EDIT: Even millions, and thats only one of thousand technologies that improve our life (expectancy)
It baffles me how many people seem to have no idea how important software is.
Software runs the world. It runs your healthcare. It runs medical research. It runs space exploration. It runs every science megaproject. None of the engineering feats mentioned above would have been remotely possible without modern software.
And modern software is built with tools like VSCode. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that VSCode was and is involved in the development and maintenance of every single project listed above.
Software controls lives. Software saves lives. Software is every single bit as important as medicine. If all software suddenly stopped working, civilization would collapse and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people would die.
That's too obvious of a troll, please, stop here for a second, take a deep breath and reconsider. It's okay, you can let go of your past mistake, nobody will blame you.
How complex is VSCode anyway compared to the older days of Eclipse IDE compiling and building apps for Blackberry and Android. If VSCode was released circa 2010 it can't even compile a small J2ME application.
VSCode is impressive, but to keep it in perspective, consider that an editor with a bug might corrupt a file, an OS with a bug might corrupt an entire file system and at worst a bad OS could actually damage hardware. Windows, MacOS, and Linux or BSDs are incredibly impressive software.
Emacs has around 6000 packages available from the most common repositories. Nine years ago Emacs had over 1.6 Million lines of code. It would be much larger now. How many lines of code in VSCode? I don't know.
However, consider really large projects in lines of code (see [1]):
Average iPhone app: .... 40,000
Space Shuttle: ........ 400,000
Windows 3.1: ........ 2,300,000
World of Warcraft: .. 5,250,000
Android OS: ........ 11,800,000
F35: ............... 24,700,000
Windows 7: ......... 39,300,000
Facebook: .......... 61,000,000
Google: ......... 2,000,000,000
May be true but I feel joy when using atom and annoyance when using vscode. There is a subtle aesthetic to atom that feels so much better. I also feel a perceptible lag with vscode at times. If it is better engineered it sometimes seems noticeably less performant.
Even if it would be running natively, the statement'd be still highly debatable.
But it's Electron based and using TypeScript, which means it uses a lot more electricity than a native solution would (about 20 times [1]), wasting precious resources.
Now consider the fact that this is a product of a company that states "to ensure that technology is inclusive, trusted, and increases sustainability."
The only amazing thing here is the level of hypocrisy, IMHO.
From a company which hindered web development efforts and made devs life misearable with IE because why not. If you are doing web development with VSCode then congratulations, why not spit yourself in the face?
Plus it's freeeee... because as a software behemoth with 1 trill marketcap you have to ruin smaller companies, because why not.
> VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering
Surely that honor goes to compilers, right (take your pick which one is the greatest)?
Sure, VSCode starts faster than Visual Studio, and has better IDE features than (pre-lsp) Emacs, but all of that dwarfs compared to the productivity increase of not writing assembly.
There is one thing that I will always remember ATOM for, and I don't mean this as a joke, it _really_ was awesome: The ATOM 1.0 Launch video (https://youtu.be/Y7aEiVwBAdk)
Is TypeScript responsible for how performant VSCode is relative to other Electron apps? I always wondered how they figured it out and all other Electron apps struggle.
I can imagine this being a reality for any developer that doesn't need to spend a majority of time in the terminal, or is more comfortable using a mouse than a keyboard (which _is_ a productivity drawback).
What are you typically developing? How often do you spend in the terminal? Are you at all familiar with modal editing? Have you tried alternative editors, like Neovim, Emacs, or any of their related distributions?
I went the trajectory from Goland -> VSCode -> Neovim. Goland -> VSCode, was a downgrade, personally. Goland/VSCode -> Neovim was surprisingly drastic upgrade.
LSP was a HUGE step forward, all editors benefit from it nowadays. Having multiple communities contributing back to the same language server makes maintaining those plugins a lot more comfortable.
I still fail to understand the importance of a language server.
One could have created a library which conformed to some specification, written the library a single time, then compiled it for different platforms. Editors could then have loaded that shared library and used it just as they wrote in support for a language server. There's no need to get a network server involved.
You still have the majority of development effort in the library, instead of individual text editors. You still have the joy of a nearly pure piece of code, without OS-specific paradigms like networking which impede progress. You still have a simple interface with the editor.
I see exactly zero benefits of having a language server over a traditional shared library, except with a network server you make a trade off where you gain latency and other networking problems, and you gain absolutely nothing.
I don't even know of any central language servers, which were one of the core benefits of the LSP design. "ooh we can all share a language server which is kept up to date independently of our editors! squeeee!" Where's that? Why is that a benefit at all? Presumably you'd still need to shut it down to update it, and someone has to manage it.
The experience that people using editors got when aeditor developers started thinking about how to do something better is what the users love, not the LSP itself. LSP triggered this change in thinking, but anything could have, and I'm honestly surprised that nothing else did prior to LSP.
VHS was of marginally worse picture quality, but for that small trade-off you got the huge benefit of being able to record a feature-length movie on one tape.
People hate on electron, but it's a pretty amazing piece of tech if you ask me. I can turn a browser game into a steam game with basically no effort which is nice because browsers change over time and electron helps you get a working offline snapshot of something you created.
I used VS Code beta and it was slow… I remember an issue in the beginning where the cursor was refreshing at 60fps, causing huge delays. The software evolved really well over the years.
Your specific example highlights the performance difference between VS Code and Atom very nicely, and VS Code is an absolute gem of engineering.
But, for large files, I am not sure it has much to do with Electron in this specific case. Notepad is about as native as they come, and famously struggled with large files - anything over a few dozen KB - for a few decades (maybe still today?). Basically, if you're going to do seriously stupid stuff in an app's code, like loading the entire file upfront and applying word-wrapping, it doesn't really matter if you're doing it 2-5x faster, it will still take too long.
Loading large files need not have anything with Electron. The file can live in another child process either fully in memory or swapped to the filesystem. When you scroll you can load the required contents into the view (Electron). For searching you can build index or even perform search on the swap and show results accordingly.. It's complex but can be done with Electron (as proved by VSCode).
Electron is essentially an operating system that runs on every operating system, so you can target just a single OS and your application works everywhere.
Yes, and that's exactly what people hate about it: every application written in Electron lugs around its own copy of this OS. You can imagine why this might not be a good idea, especially for applications designed to run in the background, like the Slack client. For me, it was a godsend when Slack decided that my Linux version was too old to support and the client stopped working. Then I switched to the in-browser version and never looked back, even after upgrading to a new machine. My laptop's CPU and memory usage are still thanking me...
In the Electron case, it’s wasteful to some degree. Especially if the app is not doing much with files/storage etc. For VSCode it makes sense to not run in the browser but for Slack, not so much.
But generally I feel like there’s too much overlap between OS, browsers, IDEs and language runtimes (JVM, V8/Node etc.). It gets worse if you add containers and VMs.
I wonder how many garbage collectors, file abstractions, JITs, databases, schedulers, GUI engines, indexers and so on are running on my machine. How many flavors and versions of essentially the same libraries are used.
There is no unified vision, of what an OS/runtime/IDE/browser should be. There’s not even a common understanding!
> I wonder how many garbage collectors, file abstractions, JITs, databases, schedulers, GUI engines, indexers and so on are running on my machine
I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day …
Teams holds the crown as far as terrible electron apps.
I actually can't run it locally (absurd tech policies), and I am so glad to never run it at all ever. Just easier to load it into an isolated browser tab when I need it, Zoom is so superior it's not even funny...
With regards to various applications, the question seems it is not if Electron is fit for them, but if they really need to be a "native application". Why does a chat application need to have it's own native package and can't run in a browser tab? With all the recent development on WebRTC and even File System Access API, can't really find a sole reason* (but feel free to point them out) for 99% of Electron applications: seems some kind of developer ego "we are not just a[nother] web app, we are native".
* Looking at an arbitrary article, "Why does Slack desktop app use Electron?" [1], the answer seems mostly aesthetics, "faster performance [citation needed] and the frameless look".
When you start building an app that does anything more than what a typical website does – basic stuff like keeping some persistent files, drag and drop, notifications, minimize to tray, using threads, the html5 apis are widely insufficient, performs poorly or – in the case of webrtc – massively over-complicated). They’re (rightfully) designed for the browser with its ephemeral untrusted model.
It’s a shame, because cross platform app building, distribution and updates is a shitshow, even with electron, putting extra labor on the developers, so neither party is happy.
That said, some apps should really be web apps, but are still bundled as desktop apps purely for the frameless “premium” experience, and I assume to not be lost among 100s of tabs. It would be great if there was better browser support for allowing users to “install” web apps, but right now the support for that is pretty poor in terms of UX.
Thought the same. So was using teams and slack in the browser. But at least for new m1 Mac, resources for running a tab and a seperate electron app are pretty similar. It's scary how much memory certain latent tabs use, especially with video ads running.
What's the big deal? Surely you have at least 512 GB of RAM, not the typical 1 TB for good measure these days. Modern computers with these bare minimum hardware requirements can handle a few electron apps.
Kind of defeats the point of having separate operating systems. I think the best environment an OS creates where apps are deigned around that OS is the value an OS brings to the table.
The selling point of Electron is that it is cross platform, but that does come at a cost. The cost is essentially running a separate instance of Chrome for every application you run that is built with it. The runtime overhead for that is significant. It is a tradeoff that works for some applications, but there are a huge number of applications for which it makes them resource-sucking pigs that do not provide value significant enough to justify the resources they consume.
The source of most of complaining about Electron and companies/developers choosing to use it is that it's not just an ordinary trade-off. The gains - being cross-platform - accrue mostly to the producer side (cheaper to develop and maintain). The costs - resource use at runtime - happens entirely on the consumer side.
In other words, it's a typical case of costs being externalized, making the supposed trade-off be a "free win" instead. Since software resists commoditization, consumers don't even have a way to pass those costs back onto the vendor (by e.g. leaving for a competitor).
Java can perform well, and even with all the enterprizey bullshit, it still performs much better than your run of the mill, best practices follower javascript program.
Javascript actually can perform well, not nearly as well as java can, but it doesn't have to be as bad as what you see on most electron applications. But it's not trivial to make it so.
Yeah, I wasn't really thinking of performance. I was thinking of the dislike I have for working with Java. Past experiences with "enterprizey" Java is the worst. AbstractWidgetFactoryBuilderLoaderMaker, etc.
Well, all the discussion about Atom, all around we is about performance. Even when the people in the discussion don't actually notice this.
But I'd put javascript and java on the same cohort when talk about usability (programability?, what name do I use here?). They are not as bad to be dangerous, but neither is any good either. Anyway, the JVM allows some other languages that don't solve all the problems but bring you some expressivity (honestly, I have no idea if this is a positive), while electron can work with typescript (much better than javascript) and can run wasm (what currently implies on rust, what means low expressivity but high confidence on your code).
There was a time when I had an equal revulsion toward languages with a Lisp-like syntax. However, dissatisfaction with the limitations of most other programming languages, and the influence of a bunch of very smart and effective developers was enough to convince me to give them another look (and try to be open minded about it).
As countless others have said before me, the parens really do cease to be an issue over time (and not really very long of a time either). The power and flexibility gained by writing code in Lisp/Scheme/Clojure or other Lisp dialects really is worth the effort, in my opinion. I'm not saying there are no bumps in the road - there definitely are. However, I have zero regrets about taking the time to learn those languages. Even if I never write another line of code in any of them again, it will still have been worth the effort.
There was node-webkit (nowadays called nw.js) that predate electron by quite some times. I remember know about it precisely because I was playing games that was developed with it.
1. Have your application look and act like a standalone application rather than a webpage—Chrome tried to support this with application shortcuts (or whatever they were called), but it never worked well enough
2. Give your application access to native APIs and capabilities that you can't get through the browser, like direct filesystem access
But it doesn’t act like an application. Most of the OS right click services, keyboard shortcuts, menu items are all missing. Accessibility tools don’t work.
It doesn't feel like one either. It feels like a shitty web page, and it costs 500$ to run. I can run apps in python and they don't feel the same way, never mind native.
They are talking in the context of games though, for which there aren’t such strong conventions, besides lives in your applications folder, and runs full screen.
This makes sense from the perspective of the individual developer, but it's also a sad reflection of the sorry state of technology that the only way to be sure a website will work in 5 years is by shipping your own copy of the browser.
I started a job in 2018 and someone commented “what are you still on Atom for? Everyone has moved to vs code”. So yeah it’s been kinda dead for a long time now.
I haven't worked for someone in years and that totally passed on me. I've tried code several times because of specific platforms it has plugins for but I never seen it as even comparable, at least not more than sublime.
No idea what problems people had with Atom, but I really hope some fork let it live on.
whoa, a whole 4 years ago!! ;-) i want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. you show up at a new job and the people make comments, of course you change. i've never used Atom, so maybe it was a better thing to change, but i've been introduced to some very ingrained workflows that just no longer made sense on so many levels. you can come in guns blazing and try to change everything now, or slowly acclimate to the workflow and then start suggesting changes/updates from inside. if you're hired as a 10x dev, then maybe guns blazing works, but if you're not, i'd suggest the latter.
Oh you’ve been programming only for a few decades?
I want to make a "kids today" joke/comment, but it's more of just the pace of trends/fads not the people per se. I’m actually a cosmic entity that views time as an artificial construct. When you’ve been around for centuries like I have, you’ll understand that trends/fads are mere points in the time space-continuum. Don’t get bent out of shape when you see one.
Somewhat unrelated, but why is it that when someone online writes an emoji with a nose, ie ;) vs ;-), I can immediately tell it's an older person? Was that something that was taught back in the day?
(Damn, it's hard to find a "list of emoticons" (or even "usenet faq") from back in the day now. So much more recent stuff clogging the search results.)
Anyway, this list of emoticons from '94 (according to the internet archive) is a pretty good representative of the sort of thing that people passed around then:
Also, RFC-1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) from October '95 has one example of a smiley in §2.1.1: "Use smileys to indicate tone of voice, but use them sparingly. :-) is an example of a smiley (Look sideways)." I suspect that at least one of the bibliographical references provided would have contained a decent list of them at the time, but so many links are dead now. (And even if some of the ftp ones still exist, most browsers have dropped ftp support now, so most people are kinda SOL there anyway.)
It like when i receive a text when no punctuation, i can tell it is a younger person. anyone using emoticons vs emojis should be the indicator in and of itself regardless if there's a nose or not. how many times did you have to push that number to get to the symbol? "huh?" you ask. shows me your age too.
> that's too many pushes of the same button, so we all learned caps are a waste
No we didn't, because on a computer it doesn't require any meaningful extra effort (unless you're a lazy kid -> another age indicator), and pre-smartphones... texting actually used to cost money. You'd probably have a plan of some 1000 free text messages / month, or sth., which isn't that much if you're a teenager, given that a text messages was limited to ~140 characters (yes, that's where Twitter's limit came from - SMS compatibility).
Caps, instead of being waste, let you skip whitespace. Instead of writing "caps are a waste", you'd write "CapsAreAWaste" (and then possibly shorten it to "CapsRAWaste"). We'd cut the message length by some 20-30% this way, which mattered for longer messages - it would turn a 4 SMS long message into a 3 SMS long one. We'd of course optimize harder when we were close to message length boundary.
Being efficient with text messaging was a critical social life skill when I was young.
I tried Atom for a while in Windows, but a file watching bug made it quite inconvenient. Every time I edited and saved a file in another IDE (at the time, I was stuck using it to compile and debug an embedded system), that IDE would rename the original to a temporary file in a temporary directory before writing the new version. Atom would follow the rename rather than re-load the new file at the original path. It would make the open tab useless.
I tried making an issue for it, but someone ranted on about moving files around on a Mac and then closed the issue.
I tried trying to solve the bug myself, but I got about 4 layers deep into callbacks across at least three different repos, and gave up.
I've been using vscode lately. It mostly just works without getting in the way. Although if you work with python, one of the extensions seems prone to glitching out and spinning a CPU core. They're at least responsive to issue tickets.
I know people shit on VSCode but in my humble opinion, VSCode single handedly destroyed Atom. Far superior tool, 100% free and adoption growth was crazy.
I also was an early tester (not adopter) of Atom and I kinda hated it right from the start, but it's been a while and I could never really put my finger on it. I think it always somehow felt sluggish (I'm talking trying out several builds over several months, not just a one-off). But I've also never warmed up to Sublime (which was fast but also felt off).
Interestingly the moment I tried out VS Code (many years later) I instantly liked it and have been using it sporadically ever since, and as people always liken the two, I am confused to this day why one felt wrong and one felt right.
I started with Sublime in college and then went to Atom when it came out because it was "Free Sublime". Granted I liked it back then but I was still a college student (had I picked it up now I would have different opinions). Almost as quickly VSCode came out and was a "Better Atom" (I thought VSCode was based on Atom for the longest time).
I wonder what will eventually replace VSCode. Lex Friedman said on his podcast that he sees VSCode as a modern Emacs which I think is a good way of thinking about VSCode.
Personally, I prefer CoffeeScript. The code gets more concise, it stimulates a coding style that's more objective and less "enterprisy" than TypeScript with all the excessive OO stuff. A simpler and more concise language attracts more contributors overtime.
However, TypeScript has clearly won and static typing can help a lot with autocomplete stuff, so there is no point fighting back.
There is a solid alternative, though. Pulsar. Atom was kind of dead, but it still had a small, dedicated fanbase including myself. Hopefully Pulsar will be able to keep the project alive as long as us Atom fans use it
VSCode is owned by Microsoft, ever since Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 it was bound to happen. The two text-editors had the same audience therefore Atom was bound to get shut.
I'm not sure it's fair to say it failed. Not everything is forever. It served very important purposes, helped push technology forward and paved the way for editors like VSCode.
I guess I'm old school, but I'm genuinely surprised by how Microsoft drove such widespread adoption of Visual Studio which, as I remember, was an expensive, basically enterprise-only IDE for very Microsoft-specific proprietary technologies like C# and .NET.
we had the conversation at University back in 2002; it went, "Atom is a dumb name" (for a beta package for editing, building in). What is this, the year of Marvel Comics taking over the Galaxy or something?
Typescript makes VSCode very slow though. I remember the feeling when switched from Atom to VSCode it's wicked fast. And then Typescript happens, my macbook's fan keeps spinning from time to time.
I think they mean the performance of VSCode editing a project with Typescript code in it. There's the runtime cost of VSCode checking the Typescript, providing intellisense, etc. (Not that I've ever had that runtime cost be noticeable to me. Maybe it's a real issue on certain codebases or workflows.)
VScode is also crap.
It doesn't even support multi screen multi-window, heh no thank you.
I can't comprehend, how anybody can use VScode for any real work.
The Atom developers made some technology choices that in retrospect were ill-advised, CoffeeScript being the worst of them and splitting everything into dozens of packages a close second. They tried to backpedal on both of these later on, but by that time VSCode, with its far superior engineering built around TypeScript, was rapidly taking over.
Of course, the GitHub acquisition was the last straw, but to be fair Atom was already pretty dead by then.
While the Atom project ultimately failed, it did give us Electron and Tree-Sitter, two technologies that will certainly outlive it.