this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Genuinely curious—why would someone choose to use notepad++ over something like VSCode in 2023?
I can't say I've used n++ in over a decade when I switched to sublime around 2010, moved again to VSCode about 5 years ago
VSCode uses electron so it's not exactly a lightweight text editor, way overkill if you just want to read a simple .txt. Add on the fact if you got way too many extension, it will be even heavier.
That's true, although from my experience is VSCode one of the very few electron apps that still start within fractions of a second, even with a handful of extensions. On my machine VSCode (with 38 extensions) is ready to use before the GNOME launch animation has finished.
That said, things are probably a bit different on machines with limited RAM.
NP++ is more lightweight and has some useful stuff builtin and easier to justify to IT dept to than a full IDE 🤷
Personally I prefer pycharm and Atom for my home needs.
Justifying it to IT makes a lot of sense actually. Particularly if you need extensions. I'm lucky I get admin on my laptop where I work
Interesting you're using atom, actually! Is it still getting much love? I assumed development would go by the wayside once Microsoft bought GitHub a few years ago (as VSCode is almost an identical product)
Yeah it's on my personal machine, I use it alongside pycharm but it's (atom) not my main IDE, I keep it because of a few things it does. I disagree vscode is the same, it's a poorer implementation of pycharm IMHO. Just my opinion though everyone is different in workspace.
I'm interested in what differs from atom about VSCode in your opinion. ~~Wasn't VSCode a fork of atom originally?~~ edit: apparently not! When I was picking between the two about 5 years ago, they seemed almost identical to me
I'm personally not a big fan of heavy IDEs like the jetbrains products, so VSCode being lighter than pycharm (or any of the IDEA products) is a bonus to me.
Look at Atom community. Speed to load is night and day.
For me, Vscode feels like a cheaper pycharm which is my primary IDE and wouldn't change as I've tried vscode as an alt and it wasn't good enough for how I work.
Fair play, everyone's different, I work with another guy who swears by the jetbrains stuff, but it just seems very clunky to me every time I've tried it.
I'll have to give atom another look then, though I'd say VSCode starts in about a second on my machine, so startup time alone probably wouldn't be a reason for me to switch
N++ can search for a string in a directory full of files, that's what I use it for. Also helpful for showing unprintable characters like linefeeds or changing bit order mode, I'm not sure vs code can do any of that.
For writing code, though, I do use vs code
IIRC you can do both of those with VSCode, I think even without any extensions too!
The search sidebar has include and exclude fields for directories to search in.
For showing unprintable characters, I think it's split into two settings: one for whitespace one for control characters like null and bell
I wasn't aware of that, I'll have to check it out. Thank you.