from Hacker News

Ask HN: From IntelliJ (Jetbrains) to VSCode, has anyone done it?

by jilles on 8/31/20, 4:10 PM with 9 comments

Hi all,

I'd say the title is pretty self explanatory. For the last few years I have been trying to switch to VSCode. However, I keep on returning to my beloved PyCharm. Did anyone successfully switch from a Jetbrains IDE to VSCode?

I'd love to use an open source editor that I can easily write plug-ins for... but I can't seem to get the same level of productivity with it.

  • by nicoespeon on 8/31/20, 4:14 PM

    Hi!

    Yup, I did the switch from Webstorm to VS Code 2 years ago. I missed automated refactoring features, which are so great in IntelliJ.

    But it's getting better, thanks to TS. Also, I was able to implement some automated refactorings as an extension.

    Not sure about Python though, but I'd check for the existing extensions, see how it goes. The good news is that you could also develop your own plugins, in JS or in Python (with a server communicating to VS Code editor using the Language Server Protocol).

  • by natalyarostova on 8/31/20, 5:27 PM

    I tried, and had the same experience as you. Lots of little things in Pycharm, like ctrl-clicking into arbitrary libraries and debugging in them, is hard to give up.

  • by caeril on 9/2/20, 12:05 AM

    This is a timely question.

    I've just recently switched from IDEA and GoLand to VSCode for Java and Go, respectively.

    Thus far I've taken on the order of a 5% productivity hit, but I'm sure this will disappear soon as muscle memory is formed. Be sure to remap your keys. Ctrl+W was critical for my use-case, as VSCode does approximately the same thing with Shift+Alt+(+/-)

  • by varbhat on 9/2/20, 3:08 PM

    Try Emacs once.

    It is Open Source. It supports Python very well. It is true extensible Editor(Elisp is Lisp which is easily extensible. there are also tons of good extensions available).

  • by deepdmistry on 8/31/20, 10:53 PM

    I was able to switch to vscode from webstorm recently, this was mostly due to incorrect ctrl click navigation in my webstorm project.

    One thing i miss is the version ctrl and diffing tools of webstorm

  • by topka on 8/31/20, 5:01 PM

    What kind of plugins would you need for PyCharm? It has quite a lot of them and you can write yours (well, yes, in Java).

    Also PyCharm is quite significantly an OSS, actually.

  • by giantg2 on 9/1/20, 2:41 PM

    I didn't use PyCharm. I used VSCode from the start. I'm happy with it, but I don't have anything to compare it with.