VS Code can do that?

by kawera • 8 years ago

469 270 8 years ago

cowmix• 8 years ago

For the past 2+ years I've continued to be amazed by VS Code. The most amazing thing about it, it works best (in my experience) on Linux.

boterock• 8 years ago

for me it doesn't work well with non-standard keyboard (colemak). All shortcuts break (at least on fedora 28 it does)

Aeolos• 8 years ago

Colemak seems to be working fine on MacOS and Windows.

narimiran• 8 years ago

I'm a colemak user with no problems with shortcuts. Try putting in your settings:

    "keyboard.dispatch": "keyCode"

and see if it helps.

atomi• 8 years ago

Shhh we don't want the brass knowing that.

Analemma_• 8 years ago

I've noticed this too: builds are faster on Linux (I assume because of the longstanding perf issues with directory traversal on Windows), and some of the GUI elements on Windows are blurry, apparently because of Chromium issues with High DPI that are outside Microsoft's control. I imagine some manager at Microsoft rips his hair out over this, but their loss is our gain.

Macha2• 8 years ago

The example I've noticed most is that touchpad scrolling is janky on windows and good on Linux on the same hardware.

ggregoire• 8 years ago

Some other ones:

- In the Git view, select a modified file, select some lines of code you modified, cmd shift P, Git: Stage Selected Ranges. I dropped my dedicated Git GUI since I know this trick.

- If you spend a lot of time coding in React, and have half of your files named index.js, do yourself a favor, go in the settings and add "workbench.editor.labelFormat": "short" (display the name of the file's folder in all the tabs)

- You can preview markdown files natively (button at the top right corner).

- Real time collaborative development: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...

michaelgv• 8 years ago

Didn’t know the Git trick, goodbye gitkraken!

Tagore7• 8 years ago

I keep hearing good things about VSCode. If I weren't essentially married to emacs I'd definitely try it out. I'm not sure I'd recommend emacs to everyone at this point, though I think it remains a really solid choice of editor/OS for people willing to get over the learning curve and put up with a bit of clunkiness.

Re the git stuff though- one place that I'm pretty sure emacs is the uncontested champ is in git integration via magit. I'd be inclined to recommend using emacs as their git interface even to people who want to use a different interface for everything else. It is that good, and IMHO the only git porcelain that is strictly better than the standard git porcelain.

cjauvin• 8 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree: Magit is that good, really. The way I see it, it reduces the burden associated with carrying the required git mental model in your mind, by giving you easier points of entry into its complexity. I owe all the slightly more advanced things I now routinely do with git (which would probably be seen as pretty basic by a lot of people though) to Magit, without question.

kenbolton5• 8 years ago

I started playing with emacs 24 years ago, then spent 20 years as a devoted vim user with a two year work-enforced gap in Eclipse. I tried spacemacs in evil mode about four years back and stayed for magit. I tried VSCode a few weeks ago to see what the fuss was about and had my Eclipse PTSD triggered. Magit, mu4e, elfeed, eww, multiterm, restclient.el, tramp, [edit]org-mode![/edit], the list of replacements for bloated "native"- and surveilling web-apps keeps growing. I mentor an up-and-coming developer who has learned more– about git, the filesystem, shells –in four weeks of using spacemacs than the 23 months of using Atom and VSCode. I know emacs in evil mode makes me smarter and more productive, and I'm seeing anecdotal corroborating evidence in my community.

abritinthebay2• 8 years ago

I'd say it's uncontested if you like using emacs. Because - for me - it's awful. Mostly because I find using vim or emacs awful and only use either of them when I absolutely can't avoid it.

But that said - it does it's job very well and magit is certainly excellent software for those that are interested in that interface.

roryisok2• 8 years ago

There's also git lens, an extension that shows who committed any line of code and links to the commit

antman• 8 years ago

For those who prefer the console with "tig" ui you can stage lines:

  tig status=> 1 to stage line, u to stage a hunk, \ to split hunks, ! to revert

crucialfelix• 8 years ago

Add Git merge tool extension to that (I forget the exact name). Previewing, selecting changes confirming and saving are really elegantly implemented.

coding123• 8 years ago

My favorite is multi-selection mode. It's not the same as "Column Mode" you find in other IDEs but try it and you will never want another editor again:

(Option)Alt-Cmd + Down or Up arrow key

From there, you can use arrow keys as normal, but instead of controlling one carrot, you control all the ones you created. So if I use the shortcut key to move to the next word, they all do, same with end of line, or what have you. In the past I had to use regex in my editors to extract quoted text in each line... now I just use multi-select. Each carrot can also be created with the mouse in the Selection menu.

Edit: Apparently it's a feature lifted from Sublime and in other IDEs - thanks!

parmesan• 8 years ago

I believe it is the same functionality as in Sublime, IntelliJ, Eclipse and others. It's a total lifesaver when editing bulk stuff, like a lot of constants and what not! One of my must-haves in an IDE.

paol• 8 years ago

Not eclipse, much to my annoyance.

matthewmacleod2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure where this feature originated, but it's been a core feature of Sublime for as long as I've used it, and is also broadly available in other editors. Definitely not a VS Code-specific thing, though it's still great!

jobigoud• 8 years ago

I believe Sublime introduced the feature. I looked it up and it was already present in the first release on January 18, 2008.

JonathonW• 8 years ago

I doubt it's where it originated, but I was using multi-select/multi-caret editing in jEdit before Sublime came around.

That and arbitrary window splitting (split any pane horizontally or vertically) are two features I really miss when they're not present. The latter's surprisingly hard to find; Sublime and VS Code don't do it (Atom does).

tenryuu• 8 years ago

Visual Studio gets this feature soon, otherwise I use it all the time in sublime

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

arbie4• 8 years ago

VS Code certainly makes VS look really bad in some areas.

staticassertion7• 8 years ago

This exists in most editors I've used (intellij is alt + shift + click or double tap alt, if I recall). I don't know how people program without this feature - they should teach this shit in school.

Multicursor is amazing.

One thing it's been great for:

I have code like:

byte b1 = array[0];

And I want to do this for 16 bytes. Control + D to duplicate 15x. Double tap control, hit up 15 times - now there's a cursor at every row. Hold control, hit right (jump by word), index to end of 'b1' on each line. Ctrl + shift + a, 'increment duplicates' - now every line is 1, 2, 3, 4... 16. `ctrl + right` my way to the index key and do the same thing.

It's awesome.

edit: I just found 'duplicate and increment' :o

tmerr• 8 years ago

And here I am using for loops like a caveman

Groxx4• 8 years ago

Yea, I have the mac bindings, and for me it's opt-click to add a cursor, and ctrl-g to select next duplicate of whatever I select. You can even do stuff like "move left 1 word" or "move to begin/end of line" and all cursors follow the same behavior, possibly with different movement-distances. Utterly trivial refactorings in any language (including english), and always feels far easier to understand / predict than Vim's record-and-replay (as useful as it is), especially since you can see the results in every instance as you type.

I've been using it in editors since well before VSCode existed. It's very nearly a requirement for me to use an editor now.

solipsism• 8 years ago

I don't know how people program without this feature

You must do some kind of programming I've not encountered in my many years. While my editor of choice can do this, I would have no idea how, because a feature like "increment duplicates" is needed so infrequently that I would never remember the shortcut.

billfruit• 8 years ago

I haven't tried this feature on VS Code, but isn't the record and replay macros feature in Emacs(normally bound to F3 and F4) a simpler(and more general, since seemingly it can record arbitrary text transformations) approach to achieve a similar effect?

SiVal• 8 years ago

Where did you find "duplicate and increment"?

philsnow• 8 years ago

I end up doing everything like that in emacs keyboard macros.

For your example, this is the kmacro I ended up with:

    ;; Keyboard Macro Editor.  Press C-c C-c to finish; press C-x k RET to cancel.
    ;; Original keys: 2*M-f M-DEL b C-x C-k TAB C-a 2*C-k 2*C-y C-p
    
    Command: last-kbd-macro
    Key: none
    
    Macro:
    
    2*M-f                   ;; forward-word
    M-DEL                   ;; backward-kill-word
    b                       ;; self-insert-command
    C-x C-k TAB             ;; kmacro-insert-counter
    C-a                     ;; move-beginning-of-line
    2*C-k                   ;; kill-line
    2*C-y                   ;; yank
    C-p                     ;; previous-line

(after you've created a macro, you can get the above by doing M-x kmacro-edit-macro.)

kazinator3• 8 years ago

In Vim: just write the first line. Then iterate on this key sequence:

  YP<Ctrl-A>l<Ctrl-A>

That can be recorded into a register (say "a") with

  qaYP<Ctrl-A>l<Ctrl-A>q

then replayed with @a, and further repeated with @@.

This is nothing new; I was doing this in Vim 20 years ago.

ben-schaaf• 8 years ago

Sometimes I have 2 alternatives for a piece of code, one commented out and the other not, and I'd like to toggle between the two. With multicursor I just select both and hit `ctrl-/` to toggle them on and off.

I've had issues in IDEs where they have shitty implementations of multicursor that break that example.

nickjj3• 8 years ago

I recently discovered a vscode extension literally called "Insert Cursor at Beginning of Each Line Selected".

Super handy when you want multiple cursors to line up at the start of every line (by default vscode will wrap the cursor around to the end of the longer lines if you try to move around with the arrow keys).

There's about 20 other extensions I routinely use, which I documented at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/switching-to-vscode-from-subl....

0x6c6f6c• 8 years ago

What's this do differently from just pressing Home with multicursors?

conistonwater• 8 years ago

carrot?

humanrebar2• 8 years ago

caret

ccharles• 8 years ago

s/carrot/caret/: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Text_c...

unhammer• 8 years ago

In Emacs this feature is called multiple-cursors: http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html – Emacs got it after Sublime. But I find I typically get things done faster with keyboard macros, or maybe I'm just too stuck in my ways :)

andrepd3• 8 years ago

Sublime's multicursor works the same way, I believe.

marssaxman• 8 years ago

(I think you mean "caret" and not "carrot".)

SSLy• 8 years ago

V to for block-visual highlight, then do your motion, hit esc and I'll be repeated on every line

nabc45• 8 years ago

Can it launch in less than 10 secs with a mechanical disk?

Can it not be unresponsive if you have a mechanical disk or a weak CPU?

Ooops, I'll stick to Sublime

shawnz7• 8 years ago

Unfortunate that you're being downvoted because the slow start time of VS code is honestly such a big blocker that it outweighs most of these features for me. I just can't wait 10 seconds every single time I want to take a note.

rp1229• 8 years ago

What is your workflow like that a few second delay is a major blocker?

I used to feel the same way early in my career. Now I don’t feel the need to be in a rush all the time.

ed_balls• 8 years ago

Is it really an issue? I think I start my editor only when I do the update and I have to reset my mac.

matthewmacleod2• 8 years ago

I'm not a fan of the idea of the editors-in-HTML craze, but designing for mechanical disk usage is a bit silly, no?

epicide2• 8 years ago

These are helpful tips for VS Code. If you don't (want to) use it, then this has nothing to do with you.

Nobody is trying to sell VS Code to you.

bproctor• 8 years ago

I've been using both lately. VSCode for when I'm working on a project and the editor ends up staying open all day. I also often have to work with large files, so I use Sublime to pop them open and make a quick change.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

Can it launch in less than 10 secs with a mechanical disk?

Well, it is 2018. Mechanical disks?

zpr• 8 years ago

Just curious, why do you use a mechanical disk?

shawnz7• 8 years ago

Mechanical disks are basically free in this day and age, so that's still a pretty significant savings over an SSD which is more like the price of a mechanical disk 10 years ago. You could cheap out and do a small SSD/large HDD combination, but I find that having an excessively small system drive is nothing but headaches, especially for software development where you are frequently installing different toolchains, etc. Until I can afford an SSD that is comfortably in excess of my storage requirements, then I'll stick with the HDD.

devbug• 8 years ago

And yet it still doesn't respect the Insert key.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adammara...

SquareWheel• 8 years ago

People actually use "work deletion mode" on purpose?

I've always wished this key at least had an LED indicator along with Caps Lock.

digi_owl• 8 years ago

Once upon a time, hitting insert resulted in the caret switching from line to rectangle to indicate input mode.

prepend5• 8 years ago

I do maybe 10% of the time as it saves a few keystrokes if you are renaming stuff. I would be annoyed if it went away. But definitely not as useful as it was 40 years ago.

Someone1234• 8 years ago

I've been using computers for over twenty years, and I'm still yet to use the insert key on purpose. My AutoHotkey profile actually suppresses the keypress entirely, along with some media keys.

rdiddly• 8 years ago

Good idea. Mine blocks F1, which gets collaterally damaged in my attempts to hit ESC. Not sure why I didn't think of this but it's going in there!

orf5• 8 years ago

That's a feature, not a bug

jhomedall• 8 years ago

I use the Overtype extension for that: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adammara...

It hasn't been updated in over a year, but I've yet to have any issues with it.

mixedCase• 8 years ago

Vim replace mode works great with VSCodeVim

wink4• 8 years ago

Really nice idea, but 90% focused on Web (frontend?) development. HTML, JS, and not much else. :(

Still found 2 useful things for me, Parens colorizer and settings sync via Github Gist.

Dinux• 8 years ago

I use it for most of my C++ projects, and it almost does a better job than Visual Studio itself.

wink4• 8 years ago

I meant the suggested addons on that page, not VS Code per se.

I'm also using it as my main editor on my Windows box at home where don't do serious development.

My only real annoyance is that I seem to run into multiple addons that can't be properly installed for one reason or another and sometimes "Ignore this" doesn't work and then the popup gets stuck and you can't see the top three lines...

Apart from that it's been really nice for Rust, Go, and Python.

donttrack• 8 years ago

I am interested in the 'almost' part. What are you missing?

satysin• 8 years ago

I like the idea of using VS Code for my C and C++ work but last time I looked at it I lost interest looking at the length of the setup page for tasks.json and all that to get a C++ build toolchain configured. Is this still the case? Why can it not be more automatic like pretty much every other editor for supporting GCC or cl.exe?

What is your setup? Is it system wide or do you configure it manually for each project/workspace/folder?

jchw2• 8 years ago

They should really add some more non-web stuff to broaden the horizons. It's awesome with Rust, Go, even C++.

humanrebar2• 8 years ago

How is the support for cmake?

tootie• 8 years ago

IntelliJ Ultimate is still better even for frontend and node.

reitanqild2• 8 years ago

At work they pay the license for us if we want it but many of us (including me) still prefer VS Code.

(And FWIW, I have used Jetbrains products before I used VS Code.)

tekkk• 8 years ago

If you're like me who prefers having million tabs open you'll find vscode to be much easier on memory usage with multiple project windows open. Also the extensions are nice although i do not know how good they are versus intellij.

wink4• 8 years ago

Maybe it's a workflow fail on my part when using VSCode but I like IntelliJ's multi-project handling very much (it mainly boils down to: one window per project, and if you relaunch it it will remember your open projects/windows, but also a few other small things.)

sergiotapia• 8 years ago

I use it extensively for Elixir development. It's fantastic.

sjbase• 8 years ago

Question, do you use any of the Elixir linter/debugger/highlighter plugins? Have any recommendations?

I'm early on in evaluating ElixirLS and vscode-elixir but have run into some issues with both.

opencl2• 8 years ago

Will it ever get encoding autodetect? That's one of the big reasons I've stayed on Notepad++. VS Code clearly does detect the encoding, because when you go to change it it suggests the right one, but it doesn't load correctly.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

It shouldn't matter in 2018. Why aren't 99.9% of your input files in either ASCII or UTF-8?

opencl2• 8 years ago

I would be thrilled if 99.9% of my input files were UTF-8, but I'm not the one writing them. SJIS remains in widespread use in Japanese companies and tons of legacy codebases do not work with UTF-8. If you're lucky there's a config flag for UTF-16.

jhasse• 8 years ago

C/C++ standard libraries on Windows still don't support UTF-8.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

If only the core was some sturdy C++ or Rust or whatever as opposed to JS and a nice GUI/Canvas lib as opposed to DOM.

marpstar2• 8 years ago

why?

robin_reala• 8 years ago

Speed. Sublime and Vim still have quite a considerable lead on VS Code for example (even if VS Code is much better than Atom).

coldtea7• 8 years ago

Do we really argue why the DOM and a full blown browser engine might not be the best option for a programmer's editor?

How low have we fallen from what programmers were concerned with memory use, and speed, and the right tool for the right job, and so on, and even Emacs was considered bloated...

arcticfox• 8 years ago

Yet it turns out that it's incredibly good, at least for what I do. So I don't care what it's written in.

dagurp• 8 years ago

Why? It works well and it's allowed them to develop it incredibly quickly.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

Well, ST3 does 70% of what VSCode does, at 1/10th the memory and much faster, and it's written by a single person.

Besides, they're still writing in a typed "language" (ts), so it's not like the dynamic language nature of JS that allows the VSCode base code to be developed incredibly quickly.

What really allows them to develop it incredibly quickly is the plugin API -- which allows tons of npm stuff to be ported and tons of JS programmers to create plugins for VS Code. A native statically typed based core would allow for that too. In fact the VSCode team already have moved some VSCode processing to C++ libs exactly for speed (and of course node itself is C++).

Using DOM for the drawing is faster (for a convenience perspective, not execution speed) yes, but with MS resources they could have made a streamlined equivalent that's much faster, more memory efficient, and doesn't have all the baggage of a web rendering engine. In fact, they have several native alternatives lying around they could make cross platform.

As it is, VSCode will ever have the burden of rendering to the DOM.

snarfy• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it just be Visual Studio then? We would get updates once a year instead of once a month. There are less C++ devs than JS devs. The size of the community that could contribute would shrink also.

coldtea7• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it just be Visual Studio then?

No, but it would "just be" an open source, MS backed, version of Sublime or TextMate. The concept of Visual Studio is different.

We would get updates once a year instead of once a month.

The language the core is in is irrelevant as to whenever we would see updates. That's a concern of the release process.

There are less C++ devs than JS devs.

Not really important, as most of the contributors are MS guys anyway. In fact a single person has made Sublime Text, an editor that offers most of what VSCode offers, with 1/100 the budget and manpower. If only it was Open Source too, or had a few more devs...

darylfritz• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it just be Visual Studio then? We would get updates once a year instead of once a month.

For what it's worth, the Visual Studio team now releases minor updates roughly every six weeks (including bug fixes and new features), and service updates almost weekly [1]. They also rely quite heavily on user feature requests [2].

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/productinfo/vs...

[2] https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

cryptonector3• 8 years ago

Just say no to those ligatures.

Sawamara• 8 years ago

I actually love using them, especially with Fira Code.

Skunkleton2• 8 years ago

Why? Not poking at you, just curious.

AlphaWeaver3• 8 years ago

Why?

cryptonector3• 8 years ago

E.g., it's easier to count the number of =s if there's no ligature.

gbaygon2• 8 years ago

I don't know how is it now, but I've used it for a couple of months for web dev on my mac and switched to Atom when noticed my cpu was 70%+ of usage all the time. I suspected it was because of the typescript plugin, but honestly I don't care Atom doesn't do that and I'm happy with it.

chrisabrams• 8 years ago

Interesting I made the opposite switch for the exact same reason.

orf5• 8 years ago

I'd have at least spent 15 minutes working out what was causing it before taking the jump and switching editors?

gbaygon2• 8 years ago

I had, but this was several version back, couldn't find any info of what was failing and also waited a major version update before doing the switch. Switching editors always causes stress. That's why it's hard to gain users back once you made a mistake on this (very competitive) field. I would only try VS Code again if Atom messes up, no matter what new micro site Microsoft PR puts online.

Edit-to-add: with your downvote you are invited to explain why/if I'm wrong.

didibus2• 8 years ago

Oh, most of those are for HTML/JS. I was hoping it was gonna talk about performance improvement or support for additional languages and features.

petee• 8 years ago

There are a ton of language extensions available, is there a particular one you are missing?

arbie4• 8 years ago

Perl?

vjeux• 8 years ago

So honored to see Prettier being the #3 tip!

orf5• 8 years ago

Congratulations!

joemaller1• 8 years ago

You earned it

outside23442• 8 years ago

Cream rises to the top - awesome tool - thanks for creating it!

dvlsg• 8 years ago

Well deserved! I was amazed at how much of a game changer a automatic code formatter was. Saves me a ton of time.

I do prefer adding a .prettierrc to projects, though, instead of inside vscode options (user or project) like what is suggested here. That way my teammates and I can use the same settings, even if they don't use vscode.

Tagore7• 8 years ago

I'm an evangelizing convert to Prettier. I was hesitant about it until I tried it, but... I am sold on it now. Prettier has costs- there are cases where I'd like to format things based on semantics not syntax, to show intent, and Prettier can't read my mind (feature request: make Prettier read my mind.)

But the costs are more than offset by the benefits. I didn't realize how much of a cognitive burden thinking about formatting was until I stopped thinking about it, and it turns out that using formatting to signal intent is perilous when people don't agree on how formatting signals intent.

I'm pushing to have Prettier used across all our JS code- there is some resistance to the idea of running it across a several hundred k line non-prettified codebase and some resistance to the idea of using it at all. And this causes problems. Prettier is best when you use it for everything.

But I'm pretty sure we'll eventually just move to prettification. It seems like the right thing to me, and I'm generally right ;). Anyway, thanks for Prettier- I am not actually a huge JS fan despite mostly writing it professionally, but Prettier does away with some of my complaints about JS, and just generally makes my life easier.

thatswrong0• 8 years ago

Prettier is the greatest thing since sliced bread for the frontend world. Seriously - not having to think about formatting (esp. breaking lines!!) is a huge boon to development

Thank you

mg74• 8 years ago

Prettier stopped working for me for 2 weeks some months ago. Least productive 2 weeks for me for a long time.

The cognitive load it costs to worry and fret about code formatting....

(thank you)

ascorbic• 8 years ago

I love Prettier so much. Thanks for making it.

scottmf• 8 years ago

Slightly off topic but this code in example #5:

  get() {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      fetch(`${baseAPI}/heroes`)
        .then(response => response.json())
        .then(json => resolve(json))
        .catch(err => {
          reject (err);
        });
    });
  }

Why not just:

  get() {
    return fetch(`${baseAPI}/heroes`)
      .then(response => response.json());
  }

AaronFriel• 8 years ago

That has fewer brackets to colorize.

akerro• 8 years ago

By the end of a day, he reports number of lines written and committed.

daybreaker2• 8 years ago

Because he needs it wrapped in a promise, sending a resolve/reject?

glitch003• 8 years ago

Fetch and response.json() both return promises. So it's still a promise.

azerothian• 8 years ago

  async get() {
    const response = await fetch(`${baseAPI}/heroes`);
    return response.json();
  }

OutThisLife• 8 years ago

  async get () {
    return await (await fetch(`${baseAPI}/heroes`)).json()
  }

Boulth2• 8 years ago

If you see `return await` glued together just like that you can drop the `await` as it's effectively a no-op in this case.

rofrol• 8 years ago

agree. I would only add rejecting when !response.ok

  function fetchPost(uri, body) {
    return new Request(uri, {
      method: 'POST',
      mode: 'cors',
      headers: {
        'Authorization': 'token 123412341234'
      },
      body: JSON.stringify(body)
    })
  }
  
  function fetchStatus(response) {
    return response.ok ? Promise.resolve(response) : Promise.reject(new Error(response.statusText));
  }
  
  fetch('https://httpstat.us/500')
    .then(fetchStatus)
    .then(function(result) {
      console.log(result)
    })
    .catch(function(err) {
      console.log('BAD:', err)
    });

https://medium.com/@luminarious/i-was-trying-out-fetch-liter...

carapace• 8 years ago

Blank page without JS, static content with JS. C'mon!

I really like VSCode. MS is innovating in UX.

Groxx4• 8 years ago

tbh I wish editors would get rid of "log breakpoints". Teach people to use the conditional breakpoint and just enter `console.log(...)` instead, it's overwhelmingly more powerful. A specialized "log breakpoint" doesn't teach them that it's just code. (I've run into quite a few programmers who have known about log breakpoints for years, used them fairly heavily, but never knew you could do things in conditional breakpoints)

Want to collect all values of something as your code runs? conditional breakpoint: `x = (x || []).append(val)` and then print it whenever you feel like it. Log breakpoint? spit it out each time and... browse by hand? hope nothing's logged in between? bah.

setr2• 8 years ago

I've never even seen log breakpoints before but is it really just a wrapper for inserting console.log()? That seems... kinda useless. From the video, it doesn't even look like it's that easy to clean-up once you're done with them (though maybe there's a remove-all function)

Teach people to use the conditional breakpoint and just enter `console.log(...)` instead, it's overwhelmingly more powerful.

If you're going to print things for insight at breakpoint time, wouldn't it make more sense to just use watch expressions?

Groxx4• 8 years ago

"stop the world and view expression(X)" is time-consuming when you're trying to discover patterns that you can later be more selective about (e.g. to turn them into a conditional breakpoint). With logs you can pretty trivially spit out thousands of them and eyeball / grep / etc however you need, which could take hours if you had to stop each time, and didn't have specialized tools to help you search for needles in the haystack.

But very frequently yes, all you need is a breakpoint and an expression, and hit "continue" a few times. I absolutely do that when I can.

---

As to "just a wrapper for console.log", yes. It's a bit of an infection, though I'm not seeing as many as I used to, so maybe we're fighting it off. but e.g.:

jetbrains has stuff like "evaluate and log": https://www.jetbrains.com/help/phpstorm/configuring-breakpoi...

Visual Studio has "condition" and "action" options for breakpoints: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5557y8b4.aspx one of which is "log a message": http://www.visualmicro.com/page/User-Guide.aspx?doc=Working-... (mindlessly copying this UI, because what VS does is Good™ (it generally is!), used to be more common from what I can remember)

even Chrome [1] and MDN [2] refer to conditional breakpoints, but only mention "will stop when condition is true", not "by the way you can mutate state in here, call funcs, anything you like".

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/java...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_...

---

It's oddly crippling to not know this kind of stuff. Ever had a bug, and you wanted to see how it would behave if var X was the right value? You can just override it in a conditional breakpoint and "fix" the bug without rebuilding, to see what happens.

Thankfully there are at least a handful of people who have realized this, despite docs essentially never calling it out: https://davidwalsh.name/debugging-conditional-breakpoints

In many languages, a debugger is very nearly a REPL. Wish Java would have a REPL? Sure, a simple CLI command would be nice, but I've done "live" coding of android apps for years. Just add a periodic callback to the main thread with a disabled breakpoint - once there, modify your views in the expression editor, and your app - on your phone - updates in the very next view tick. There are limitations, like (kinda) not being able to import new things, but they're not hard to work within and the time savings can be immense.

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

Don't teach people to program using IDEs if you actually want them to learn how things work.

Groxx4• 8 years ago

Don't give people saws until they spend years chopping down trees with axes. Or maybe they should start out by punching them down, we weren't born with axes you know, and you won't understand a saw until you feel the wood fibers buckling under your knuckles.

No. This stance is complete nonsense. People who don't want to learn how things work won't learn either way, but an IDE can at least make them safer and more productive. For people who do, an IDE can magnify your abilities quite a lot. All of which is true for any (decent[1]) tool in any field.

[1] here, have a twitter rant. You're advocating for the Hole Hawg: https://twitter.com/myrrlyn/status/980148201456943104

prepend5• 8 years ago

Is there a way to have intellisense sense work with python dictionaries? It seems like intellisense for json would be a similar issue as nested dictionary representations in json, but I can’t find anything that does this and don’t want to use another class just for faster coding.

crdoconnor• 8 years ago

You'd need access to the runtime environment in order to do that.

That said I wish somebody would make an IDE that would tightly integrate IPython so I could get IDE autocompletion in a paused test. I spend way too much time writing code in IPython prompts and copying it back.

prepend5• 8 years ago

You can check design time for any strings placed in source. Which is really what I want. I don’t need intellisense for stuff populated at runtime as much.

switch007• 8 years ago

On a related note, Pycharm has it IIRC

prepend5• 8 years ago

Good point. I saw this in Pycharm but won’t pay.

outside23442• 8 years ago

My favorite is when you have a git merge conflict - just open the file in VSCode and you can visually merge it. I can't explain the feeling of joy I had when I discovered this - and this keeps happening over and over with VSCode.

dawnerd• 8 years ago

Atom got this recently too and it’s such a lifesaver. I keep switching back and forth each time one gets a feature the other doesn’t have.

moltar• 8 years ago

Pretty basic list of things...

reitanqild2• 8 years ago

My favourite "features": the ecosystem and the development speed.

It keeps getting better and better and better month by month and it now even knows how to fix small stupid mistakes like a missing this. when trying to access a field in ts etc.

itwy2• 8 years ago

I recently switched to JetBrains products. Their IDEs are much smarter. Infinitely better than VS Code, Sublime and whatnot. It's the closest thing to pair coding!

aleksi• 8 years ago

VS Code can do that too: https://code.visualstudio.com/visual-studio-live-share

itwy2• 8 years ago

I meant the IDE acts as another pair of eyes on your code.

cbayram• 8 years ago

I'm also partial to WebStorm. Local history feature of Eclipse derivates has saved me enough times to make it a core pre-requisite when considering another IDE. Fwiw, VS Code has better typescript support.

bunderbunder4• 8 years ago

In the spirit of cranky HN bikeshedding, I present: The page body, as seen by a NoScript user:

  <body>
    <div id=app></div>
    <script type=text/javascript src=/static/js/manifest.14a76fad9b304f57d579.js></script>
    <script type=text/javascript src=/static/js/vendor.ffa8aef8ba29f634abaf.js></script>
    <script type=text/javascript src=/static/js/app.08230312c2e739a44ea1.js></script>
  </body>

Web developers: Please, you can do better than this.

roryisok2• 8 years ago

There certainly should be a static page version. Especially since there is barely any interactive element to this, it's essentially just a list of links

sebazzz• 8 years ago

It is certainly an interesting choice to use a fully fledged SPA framework to render a static page. And since it runs on Azure App Services, I'd say server side rendering should be possible.

allover3• 8 years ago

The audience for this site is front-end developers.

Front-end developers don't tend to view the web with NoScript. Just like 99% of users don't view the web with NoScript.

bunderbunder4• 8 years ago

Is it just for front-end developers?

I'm a back-end developer, but, when I wanted to indent that HTML in order to post it, I switched over to the instance of vscode that I virtually always having running in order to use its pretty printer.

Ninn• 8 years ago

Please know that no one really cares. You must realise you cannot expect to consume our applications but only on your own terms. Theres no contract saying you should ONLY serve HTML on the web.

Amezarak3• 8 years ago

I can't speak for gp, but the reason I whitelist Javascript is because the dozens of third party scripts pages load provide no benefits to me as a user and only waste my bandwidth and cpu while risking my security and privacy. Sometimes the first-party scripts do something useful and I enable them.

That a simple document with embedded videos "needs" js to load at all is sheer lunacy. The modern web is a massive house of cards. I don't want to be uncivil but I find it very hard to understand how anyone thinks they're doing good work after they create a simple (and useful!) web document that requires javascript to load.

If you're using Javascript to make a web application, fine, clearly there's no reasonable alternative. But if you need Javascript to produce a web document, what are you doing? I wonder how much more electricity is being consumed annually processing utterly pointless Javascript.

JoshMnem4• 8 years ago

In general, one should serve HTML on the web unless you're doing something that requires JavaScript. JS is a big security/privacy risk. At the moment, I keep JS and CSS off by default on my main browsing profile, overriding it with umatrix when a site requires it and it looks useful enough to bother.

bunderbunder4• 8 years ago

I popped over to a different browser to take a peek. That's not an "application". It's static page with some embedded YouTube videos, and some hyperlinks. It just happens to be one where it takes about 5 seconds (on my computer) before the hyperlinks become clickable, for some reason.

I do agree that there is no contract saying you should only serve HTML on the web. But still, you can do better than this.

9mit3t2m9h9a• 8 years ago

Last time when nobody cared about a broken nest of security holes in the center of the Web, a small minority had organised a campaign to annoy people with complaints.

I mean Mozilla's campaign asking users to send complaints to each and every webmaster writing IE5-only sites. It somewhat worked.

specialist• 8 years ago

I'm a true artist and no one understands my genius. Heathens!

kenbolton5• 8 years ago

I'm building a pipeline that sends pages like this out to splash and returns the js-rendered html to my browser.

andrepd3• 8 years ago

Like holy shit, how can a webpage displaying text and videos slow my supercomputer to a halt. Truly a feat of technology.

dragonshed2• 8 years ago

It was pretty fast on my phone.

I'd replace the snark with additional details so the author could attempt to reproduce your issue.

jesalg• 8 years ago

Yeah, this could be a static HTML/CSS site but that's the state of the modern web for better or worse. Markup rendered by a framework like React/Vue and bundled up with Webpack. It's just easier to build that way.

make3• 8 years ago

you can't expect any one to invest money for the 0.000001 %

pvg• 8 years ago

That's the spirit of pointless, offtopic shitting all over a thread. You can and should do better than this.

yashap• 8 years ago

It’s a page aimed at web devs, evangelizing an editor written in JS. If you want to read it, turn on JS. If you turn off a key component of the modern web, you should expect that things will break, and not complain about it.

mcav• 8 years ago

Your criticism might be better understood with less prejudice; perhaps something like this instead:

"Websites should not unnecessarily require JavaScript."

wolco2• 8 years ago

Has anyone figured out how to edit files directly from a remote directory over ssh/ftp?

reedr• 8 years ago

I use sshfs for that..

dragonshed2• 8 years ago

+1 for sshfs. I had it working on macOS at one point when frequently working on a raspberry pi, but haven't needed it since.

wolco2• 8 years ago

I would love a good stable windows sshfs client. It usually works great until the connection gets idle then freezes.

ehsankia5• 8 years ago

I'd love to have a package for that too. On Sublime I use sFTP and it works really well. You can either load files directly from an sftp connection, or map a directory, and every time you modify a file, it gets synced automatically.

It's a simple package, but it works very well.

efrecon• 8 years ago

ftp-simple works pretty well. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humy2833...

FBISurveillance• 8 years ago

One thing I really miss in VSCode is Sublime-like search result display in a new tab that shows the result and surrounding lines. The "panel" search results view VSCode has now is far from perfect.

omn1• 8 years ago

Check out this: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/23931#issuecommen...

Add this to your settings:

``` "search.location": "panel", ```

Not perfect, but it's a start.

tjr225• 8 years ago

I've been using VS Code as a light sql server workbench.

I have got to check out the docker features as well.

kenbolton5• 8 years ago

Q: But does it org-mode?

A: No.

Long A: Org-mode is plain text. So it org-modes, but not in a meaningful way.

gecko• 8 years ago

Meh, it's nascent, but it's not so underpowered as to be genuinely useless:

https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode

I've used it over Emacs for simple use cases without any real issues, and the project's under very active development.

tincholio• 8 years ago

If you're only using org basically as an outliner, then it might be ok for editing. But I see no indication of babel, exporting, agendas, etc...

swrobel• 8 years ago

Can't Atom do all of this as well?

Boulth2• 8 years ago

One thing I miss with VS Code is something akin of Eclipse Mylyn. When working with large code bases it's invaluable!

stevefan1999• 8 years ago

VSCode can do all sorts of thing, but the huge runtime dependency (Electron/CEF) and slow startup time is kind of unfavourable.

Well, maybe it’s my extensions that made it slow.

VS Code can do that?

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