Visual Studio Code

If you ask developers which IDE they use, you'll get 8 different opinions from 5 people. You'll get everything from the Vim/Emacs hardcore guys to Eclipse/IntelliJ to Visual Studio for the .NET developers. As the choice of languages and technologies grows, the editors/IDEs for those technologies grows as well.

For over a decade, I was an Eclipse and IntelliJ fan (and those were the tools supplied at the workplace). And during my .NET days, I was a Visual Studio user. In recent times, my development has been focussed on a fairly common stack and some very popular tools:

• Microservices using Java and Spring Boot
• Data strorage on some flavor of a SQL database and Elasticsearch
• UI with Angular 5 and TypeScript
• GIT and Docker

I started off with using a combination of Eclipse, something like TextWranger or Sublime for text editing (I like to take notes :)) and just iTerm2 as my shell on my Macbook Pro. And this obviously works well -- time tested! As I continued to use this toolset (and then at some point I started using IntelliJ), I found that things were much slower (launching the IDE, compilation, etc.) than I was happy with, even on a spec'd up MBP.

So, in my quest to find a lighter weight environment, I first ran into Atom and then into Visual Studio Code. Atom was developed by GitHub and pitches itself as "a hackable text editor for the 21st century". It is a great editor but I wasn't too happy with using it as a Java IDE (a little buggy, crashes etc.). VSCode was developed by Microsoft and when I started using it -- I immediately got enamored with it. It was blindingly fast, super stable and did the top 10 things I want an IDE to do without all the overhead.

At the core, it is a code editor with out-of-the-box support for TypeScript, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JSON and couple of other things. But you can convert it into a very functional IDE by adding various language support plugins. It also comes with built-in support for intellisense, debugging (breakpoints, etc.), Git and Docker. This alone covers most of the stuff I was interested in. It has sublime style "minimaps", built-in terminal, side-by-side windows, file explorer that is super useful while doing code reviews and everything is extremely customizable.

But, enough about me selling it. Give it a whirl yourself and see if it meets your needs. I've been using it for a year now and it would be difficult to launch Eclipse or IntelliJ for editing code :).

And, here are some of my favorite features:

And extensions:

• Java Support
• Angular Support
• Spring Initializr
• GitLens
• Docker Support
• REST Client

And lots of others @ https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/vscode.

Here is all the documentation you'd ever want.

Cheers!