Title: Migrated to VS Code and so happy
Slug: migrated-to-vs-code-and-so-happy
Date: 2019-02-21 19:30:00
Author: Kartones
Lang: en
Tags: Development, Tools
og_image:
Description: A positive experience migrating from JetBrains and Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code for both work and personal projects.


Since I left .NET development I've tried using a few IDEs, but mostly sticked to [Jetbrains](https://www.jetbrains.com/) suite for work and [Sublime Text](https://www.sublimetext.com/) 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](https://blog.kartones.net/post/Code-and-style-checks-for-Python-at-Sublime-Text/)). In 2018 I decided to test [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/) 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](https://www.jetbrains.com/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_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](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare)! I'm so glad I tried that last one, as in the past I've had to rely on the basic [tmate](https://tmate.io/) + [vim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)) 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](https://blog.kartones.net/page/vscode-extensions), 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.