The Visual Studio Code Thread

I still think netbeans is better.

@jlrdw lol that's quite the statement. I've been using netbeans for school and I can say for sure that wouldn't be able to associate Vscode with netbeans in any way.

What makes you dislike vscode tho?

I switched to VS Code last December, mostly for Vue/front-end development, but recently for Laravel/PHP. It feels fast and light-weight and has matured greatly since last year. I look forward to the consistent monthly updates. As with any tool, your mileage may vary, but it's definitely worth a try.

The team behind VS Code is very motivated and transparent. You can read their roadmap and follow the detailed monthly iteration plans to see what's coming.

Editor experience

The experience is pretty standard for a modern code editor. It's a relatively smooth switch from Sublime or Atom. You can customize the keyboard shortcuts or just install the Sublime and Atom keymap extensions to jumpstart the conversion. A few nice color themes are bundled and many more are available in the extension marketplace.

Out of the box VS Code ships with almost everything you need for front-end development (git integration, js debugging, diff tools, search, syntax highlighting, integrated terminal, intellisense, emmet, code folding, go to definition, markdown preview, split screen, zen mode, tabs, etc.). The excellent documentation covers all the core features.

Extensions

The extension marketplace is full of great add-ons for almost every use-case. VS Code also supports extension packs (pre-packaged bundles of extensions) and recommends extensions for you.

My extension list includes:

General

• Advanced New File (cmd+alt+n to create a new file)
• Beautify (Beautify javascript, JSON, CSS, Sass, and HTML)
• ES Lint
• Git History (View git log along with the graph and details)
• HTML Tag Wrap (alt+w to wrap selection with tag)
• Import Cost (inline display of imported JS package size)
• SVG Viewer
• Path Intellisense (autocomplete filenames)
• Colonize (shortcuts to add semicolon to end of line)
• Markdown Navigate
• Markdown Shortcuts
• VSCode Great Icons (extensive icon pack for file explorer)

Vue - also check the VueJS Extension Pack

• Vetur (now officially supported by VueJS - almost everything you need for Vue development in one package)
• Sarah Drasner's Vue VSCode Snippets

Laravel/PHP - also check the Laravel Extension Pack

• PHP Intellisense (the core PHP extension for VS Code)
• PHP Namespace resolver (import and expand and your class)
• Laravel 5 Snippets
• Laravel Blade Snippets
• Laravel Artisan
• Laravel Helpers

Conclusion

VS Code is hard to beat for front-end web development. With a combination of built-in tools and extensions, it covers almost every need. It works well for smaller Laravel/PHP projects, but stick to PHPStorm for heavy refactoring and more advanced PHP work. The PHP extensions are still maturing, but efforts are underway.

@neovive Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation! I'm definitely going to be checking out vscode now!

I've been trying it out a bit - really the one thing that's stopping me using it full-time is the muscle-memory I have for sublime's cmd-p to toggle between two open files. I must do it 100's of times a day. Even with the sublime keymap install in vscode it doesn't do quite the same thing.

Another minor nag is I haven't found a way to make the text in the 'zen' editor window (aka 'distraction free mode') be a bit more centred. On a large monitor it's left-aligned which is a bit annoying to look at.

The 'laravel goto view' extension is great - can't find anything quite like it for sublime.

@ohffs I'm going to test out the goto view extension.

I totally agree about Zen Mode. On larger monitors, I just turn off full-screen Zen Mode in user settings with "zenMode.fullScreen": false, so everything is hidden and I can strech as needed. There are some open issues for centering text in Zen Mode.

Have you tried, Ctrl+tab for toggling or setting a custom keymap for toggling? It won't solve your issue, but it's something.

@neovive yeah, the zen mode thing is a bit of a niggle. But they seem very active in addressing user requests so fingers crossed. I've tried various things to toggle files - it's purely that my muscle-memory hits cmd-p-return so in vscode I spend the day doing 'cmd-p-return :: argh! :: cmd-p-cursor-down-return' ;-)