I have long been a pro­po­nent of sim­ple text ed­i­tors.

Not for me was emac­s, with its mul­ti­tude of modes and mag­i­cal elisp code to do ev­ery­thing.

Not even vim with its mul­ti­tude of ex­ten­sions achiev­ing mag­i­cal pro­duc­tiv­i­ty with three key­strokes.

Not even would I use the ubiq­ui­tous jet­brains IDE with mag­ic refac­tor­ing that writes code on its own.

No, for twen­ty years or so I have writ­ten my code us­ing a plain text ed­i­tor. Un­til re­cent­ly, that meant kwrite. Not even kate. Kwrite, the one that is slight­ly more pow­er­ful than notepad.

But then I got a new job, and ev­ery­one us­es an IDE so I start­ed think­ing... I must be miss­ing some­thing.

Be­cause if ev­ery­one is do­ing it dif­fer­ent­ly from you, then one of the fol­low­ing things is like­ly to be true:

• ev­ery­one is wrong
• it's pure­ly an opin­ion thing and it does­n't mat­ter much
• you are miss­ing out

You know you are old once you as­sume the first. Since I am go­ing through some sort of weird mid life cri­sis I am forc­ing my­self to choose the last op­tion most of the time. So, I start­ed try­ing out stuff. Which is why I no longer use bash. Or uni­ty. Or KDE. But those are sto­ries for some oth­er bon­fire, this one is about my text ed­i­tor midlife cri­sis.

Atom

It's huge. And slow. Like, re­al­ly slow. And the ex­ten­sion qual­i­ty is very un­even. For ex­am­ple, all the ter­mi­nals felt wrong.

Once it start­ed drag­ging af­ter be­ing open for a cou­ple of days... well, I re­moved it and smug­ly went back to my old work­flow.

And then I tried...

Pycharm

The ex­ten­sion qual­i­ty was soooo much bet­ter! And some are just awe­some. The way you can choose a vir­tualenv in­ter­preter for a project is awe­some.

Com­pared to Atom it's down­right snap­py!

The on­ly things I did not like were:

• So much mag­ic in place, some­times things on­ly worked in the IDE.
• Too slow to start, so I still had to use a plain text ed­i­tor for ca­su­al ed­it­s.
• At one point, things start­ed to rot, and func­tions that had been work­ing fine start­ed to mis­be­have.

So then I had my goldie­locks mo­men­t...

VSCode

I was ex­pect­ing to hate it. It's called Vis­ual Stu­dio! It comes from Mi­crosoft! It's elec­tron-based like Atom!

Yet, I loved it at first sight.

Not go­ing to go over many de­tails be­cause I am not in the busi­ness of con­vinc­ing peo­ple of things but here are some of the high­light­s:

• Good python sup­port, in­clud­ing vir­tualen­vs, for­mat­ting, au­to­com­plete, refac­tor­ing, de­bug­ger, etc.
• Good Go sup­port.
• Nice ter­mi­nal gad­get! Ctr­l+click to open files men­tioned in the ter­mi­nal!
• Good mark­down/reSt sup­port in­clud­ing pre­views
• The "com­pared to work­ing tree" view is ge­nious
• If you run "vs­code some­file" in the ter­mi­nal, it opens in the cur­rent vs­code.
• The set­tings mech­a­nism and UX are a great idea.
• It's fast enough
• The UI is fair­ly min­i­mal, so most of the time it will look like my pre­vi­ous work­flow used to look: two text files open side by side.
• Test run­ner in­te­gra­tion is neat.
• In Ubuntu you can install it as snap install vscode --classic ... takes all of 30 seconds. And it's updated forever.
• Lots and lots and lots of de­cent qual­i­ty ex­ten­sion­s.

So, all in all it does all the things I liked from the IDE side of the uni­verse while not mak­ing the things I liked from text ed­i­tors less con­ve­nien­t. And that's why I use it now.