cat posts/2015-04-30-visual-studio-code.md

Visual Studio Code: Microsoft ships an editor for everyone

· 2 min read · microsoft tools editors

I installed Visual Studio Code on my Mac about twenty minutes after the Build keynote yesterday, which is a sentence I would not have believed if you’d shown it to me in my MVP days. Microsoft, shipping a free code editor, for OS X and Linux, on day one, with the Windows version no better than the others.

My first impressions, after a day of using it on real code at work (Node and a bit of C#):

It’s fast. Faster than Atom on the same machine, noticeably, which is funny because it’s built on the same thing, Electron, the shell GitHub wrote for Atom. The editor component looks like the one Microsoft has been using in its browser-based Visual Studio Online tools, and it shows, everything feels a bit more finished than you’d expect from a preview.

IntelliSense works for JavaScript and TypeScript out of the box, and for C# through OmniSharp, which means I got real completion on an ASP.NET 5 project on a Mac. There’s a debugger for Node that actually stops on breakpoints. Git is built in, with a diff view I like better than the one in full Visual Studio, honestly. Hanselman’s write-up has the full tour.

What’s missing is a lot. There’s no extension system yet, which for an editor is most of the story (Microsoft says it’s coming). The file explorer is basic, there’s no split into more than three panes, and it’s a “preview”, so expect things to change under you. It’s aimed squarely at people using Sublime and Atom, and anyone with a big .NET solution will stay in full Visual Studio.

The bigger thing for me is the platform list. Six months ago they open sourced a chunk of .NET and said it would run on Linux and the Mac. Now there’s a Microsoft editor I can use on my Mac and on the Linux boxes I ssh into, for languages Microsoft doesn’t own. I spent years defending .NET to people who refused to touch it because it locked you into Windows, and they weren’t wrong. If Microsoft keeps going this way, that argument goes away, and I think a lot of developers who wrote Microsoft off around 2005 are going to quietly try it again.

Will I switch? I wrote years ago that tools don’t matter much and I still mostly believe it. I’ll keep it on my dock for a month and see whether I reach for it or for Sublime.