Am I alone in not jumping on the Visual Studio [Code] bandwagon? Other online editors have had "vim modes" for ages (e.g. Overleaf) and frankly I'm unlikely to write a chonking great script or project in a browser on Github -- a minor modification is much more likely. VS Code's codebase is huge. Will Github allow people to use other $EDITORs?
(Yes, I'm aware this makes me sound like an old man!)
I am a developer for almost 15 years now. My primary operating system is windows. I have used Linux but only sparingly.
I have used many IDEs.
I have never ever felt the need to use vim.
Is it fair to say, because VSCode does not have a "vim mode", it is somehow inferior as an editor?
I seriously don't get it. I have used VSCode almost from day one. It is a fantastic editor and quite a capable tool. I seriously love it.
I've written a lot of C, a lot of scripting languages, and a bit of C++. I've used many IDEs.
For me, the "command line" workflow of Makefiles, vim & gdb are really, well, great. When I was a graduate student, I did a lot of pair-programming with a vim wizard who showed me just how insanely fast one can be with it -- it's small, but extensible. Sufficiently intelligent that you can open a 10 GB+ text file in it, jump to a certain line, make a change and exit; all before VS/VSCode would have opened. It's an add on to an IDE. Sometimes, for me, it replaces it.
I've never ever felt the need to use VS, or VSCode. I know other devs love VS for C++, but I love vim – VS feels like a big, bloated IDE where you have to memorise the location of 4e6 different GUI positions and take your hands continually off the keyboard to do anything. Intellisense (and, to a lesser extent, Windows as a whole) deeply irritates me. Vim has a weird, esoteric language with a learning cliff rather than a learning curve -- but I've used it almost from day one. It lets me feel incredibly powerful; it's light, yet has more features than I will ever need.
You and I are different. We've got different interests, different application areas in mind, and different preferences for how to write code and debug it. And that's okay! The key to being productive is accepting that people are different, work differently under different circumstances, and have different strengths, skills, and preferences. It's much better to be accommodating of them, rather than stifle them, and leave a proportion of your staff frustrated.
I'm just very slightly peeved that your preferences are being chosen by Github as a defacto default $EDITOR, but that there is no option whatsoever for mine – despite the fact that javascript vim / emacs "modes" are recognised as being almost religious, with highly developed FOSS javascript libraries nearly offering both keybindings and an implementation for either editor at a click of a button [e.g. 1] that have been around for >10 years.
On top of that, I can't help but notice that Github is usually very accommodating with individual developers' preferences -- to the extent there are often multiple ways of doing things as a result. The fact that, now, both Github and VSCode are both Microsoft products -- and that Microsoft famously likes people to use its "infrastructure", which is often orthogonal to the rest of the world -- just makes a little tiny bit of me feel like this is a change being pushed upon us, as originally explained in their "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy. I get it, it's a neat feature in beta, and it'll directly benefit some large proportion of their users. But if they're going to deploy fully equipped editors to the web, I'd like to have the ability to chose mine -- and give you the freedom to choose yours. I can't help but think that if this feature was developed prior to their acquisition by Microsoft, it wouldn't be VSCode that was deployed.