[tlug] Nice editor/IME

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

I've been test-driving Microsoft Visual Code the past couple of weeks.
Make sure you are sitting down, Linux die-hards, but I think it is
perhaps the best text editor/IME for Linux.

It is open-source (MIT)... well, if you download it from Microsoft,
there is a nasty license agreement. https://code.visualstudio.com/
But it is on github: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode
See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005
for the difference.


If you want to disable crash reporting and telemetry, see:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-disable-crash-reporting
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-disable-telemetry-reporting


That was the first thing that impressed: the way you change user
settings is very nice and clear.

The git integration is wonderful, something I've been wanting for years.
Every other GUI tool for git is messing around drawing branch trees. The
vscode git support is just about making it easy to stage, write a commit
message, make sure just the changes you want to get committed each time,
etc. I mess up at least once a week using git's "-a" argument, from the
commandline.

I actually installed it to evaluate Electron, as a platform, which is
what vscode is built on. I've tried Atom before, also built on Electron;
lots of interesting plugins, but slow, especially with large files.
vscode has been very responsive so far; I tried a 130K line file, and
could scroll around with no problems.

I've mainly been using it with Python this week; I installed a couple of
plugins, but feel I might be missing something, as code completion
didn't always work. No annoying project files - it has not created
anything at all in my project directories.

I've heard good things about the Javascript debugging abilities; I did a
quick test, but not enough to really comment yet. Visual studio debugger
has always been nice, so I'm looking forward to trying it on some C++ code.

Japanese input worked fine (I'm using mozc on Mint, xcfe).

Overall it seems good enough in all areas, and the git integration is
the killer feature that will keep me using it.

Darren

P.S. Anyone else here building anything with Electron?


-- 
Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer
My New Book: Practical Machine Learning with H2O:
  http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920053170.do