Since I left .NET development I've tried using a few IDEs, but mostly sticked to Jetbrains suite for work and Sublime Text for personal projects. Jetbrains products require some setup for non-trivial projects, and Sublime's power came with its extensibility via packages (e.g. it's very easy to setup Python linting). In 2018 I decided to test Visual Studio Code after reading so much good feedback about it. At first I tried it at home, just for Python and basic web development, but after a few weeks, not only I uninstalled Sublime, but even decided to try it at work (instead of PyCharm). The results cannot be more satisfying.
I've come to terms with myself regarding what I can get from IDEs other than the real Visual Studios; In my opinion nothing will ever get as good as Visual Studio 2008 upwards (or even as the old Turbo C. But if I at least can have a tool that is fast, does the job, helps me being productive and has a few shiny extras, then it's fine.
I've installed nice extensions which allow me to just keep minimized CSS for my websites, and then re-format it in a second, change whatever I need and then re-compress & minimize. I can navigate through Python object definitions and have mypy type hint warnings. I can even now do live code editing and pair programming with the just discovered VS Live Share extension! I'm so glad I tried that last one, as in the past I've had to rely on the basic tmate + vim combo.
I might still sometimes suffer to attach to a debugging statement and have to rely on SSHing and a terminal to do it instead, but while Pycharm took ages to index and reindex and index again, VS Code just boots up and I get my last opened files and get back to coding in no time.
As a final note, I've setup a extensions and configuration blog page, so I can keep track of which extensions I use and keep at hand my customized editor config in JSON (to just copy & paste). It is nothing special, just a mixture of React, Python, Docker and miscellaneous web related plugins.
Tags: Development Tools