I was a Windows user since I remember, I loved all the Microsoft products, even his hardware, like Surface... until I met Linux when I joined to Altoros. With Linux I started to see a new world, open source applications, a comunity, people sharing his knowledge, his own code, developers improving software made by other developers. Microsoft is very good, but maybe if they'd start to share his code or start to listen his users in a different way, they could make much better products.
At the University, studying CS, the professors recommended Eclipse as the perfect IDE, with so many features: auto-completion, references to the method definition, linters and so on. It took a life to open it, so slow, so passionated about your RAM, it wants it all! Then I heard about Sublime Text, it was love at first sight: fast, simple, basic and powerful at the same time, with a lot of plugins to extend its functionality.
A couple of weeks ago, a client told us that they will start to use TypeScript and ask me to take a look to Visual Studio Code because someone recommended him as a good tool to code using TypeScript.
To be honest, my first thought was: "Visual Studio? Microsoft? I don't think so...", but well... client's always right, heh?
So I went to Google and type Visual Studio Code and enter here: https://code.visualstudio.com/. First things I saw in his web: multi-platform, more than 10 thousands stars on GitHub (GitHub? Nice!) and Extensions. Very good start! So I went to the GitHub project and the title said: "Visual Studio Code - Open Source", then I saw the issues, how organized they were... I couldn't wait any longer, let's install this thing!
You just have to download a file, extract it and you're ready to go, easy.
Short answer: nothing. I found them pretty similar, both of them are fast, minimalistic, with plugins to extend its functionality. Even most of the shorcuts are the same.
The thing I love most of VS Code is the integration with GIT and the Debug mode, both of them out of the box. But you can also found:
- Linter for JS, CSS, LESS, SASS and Java
- Language Colorization (syntax highlighting) for a lot of languages
- Markdown preview (live). I'm using it to write this Post.
- Developer Tools (because it's developed using Node.js)
- Create your own snippets
- User and Workspace settings
- Themes
- Tasks: VS Code auto detects gulp, grunt and jake tasks from your project files and it can ran them if you want.
- Extensions and Extension Manager (Package Control for Sublime Text users)
VS Code is just starting, but you already have several extensions to use. I just installed 2, so far:
- semistandard, to validate my JS code (the linter included by Code it wasn't enough)
- Slack Integration, to share code (entire files o just pieces) on Slack channels
You'll see 5 categories on the MarketPlace:
- Debuggers
- Languages
- Linters
- Snippets
- Themes
- Other
Or you can create your own.
I'm glad that Microsoft is back again! Understunding the new ways to do the things, sharing his knowledge with the developer comunity and giving them a very good product, but most of all listening to his users and implementing the new features that they were requesting.
I think you should give it an opportunity, it won't disappoint you.