Trying out Visual Studio (WIP)

For the first time in 6 years, I had to use Windows for Python development for one of my contracts. Using Windows isn’t a problem, but it turned out that using Spacemacs on Windows wasn’t as seamless an experience as I remember the use of a rather standard Emacs config was. It takes about 40 seconds to load my Spacemacs config, magit is almost unusably slow and the biggest issue: several times a week I have to kill Emacs because the helm interface locks up.

It could be that some of these issues are due to the fact that I have to use a locked-down company laptop that has all kinds of virus and monitoring tools active. However, the slowness was something I experienced on my home Windows PC too. So I decided to try out Visual Studio.

Initial impressions

First of all, VSCode starts up really fast, within two seconds. This doesn’t mean it has fully initialized itself but it’s ready for editing. As mentioned, on the same laptop, my Spacemacs config takes about 40 seconds.

The UI reminds of a well-lit front-garden during Christmas time. Apart from the text of the code, there are all kinds of (to me) distracting visual cues. For example, you have the “indentation guides”, virtual bars in your code that indicate blocks of code at the same level. If the cursor is at a variable, all instances of that variable are automatically highlighted. Furtunately, VSCode is extremely configurable and you can significantly reduce the visual clutter.

It’s very nice that you don’t need a mouse to access most functionality. If you press <ctrl> <shift> p, the “Command Palette” opens. This is a drop-down box this lists all commands and as soon as you start typing, it only shows the commands that match the characters you type. To execute a command, select it and press <enter>. The commands that have a direct keyboard shortcut are listed with that shortcut and this helps you memorize them.

VSCode comes with a lot of plugins, “extensions” to extend its functionality. Finding them and installing them is easy. One of the first I installed were Vim, a Vim emulation, and VSpaceCode, Spacemacs-like keybindings to access VSCode commands. This made the editing experience a very familiar one.

Working with VSCode

The keybindings that VSpaceCode adds work when you’re inside a code editor but when the focus is somewhere else, you have to rely on the official ones. For example, <space> p f opens the “Search files by name” dialog. When you’re inside the Explorer, that keybinding doesn’t work and you have to use the official one, <ctrl>+<shift>+F. Fortunately, most of the original keybindings seem to be still in-place.

There are some interesting comments about the Peek view at GitHub vscode/#22261, “make finding all references more user-friendly”. Apparently I’m not the only one that has trouble warming up to it, two quotes from different users,

• “Whenever I try to use Find References now, it just adds to my confusion. The file within a file view […] just doesn’t work for me.”
• “The fact that it is rendered right inline is not helpful to me, and is visually confusing to have a snippet of code from somewhere else displayed right in the middle of where I am.”

One of the comments for this GitHub issue mentiond that VSCode can show the references in the sidebar - set Settings | Extensions | Reference Search View | Prefered Location to view. This only works for the original keybinding <shift> <alt> F12. VSpaceCode keybinding , g r still uses the Peek view.

As one user comments, showing references in the sidebar gives you a very narrow view on the code. The bottom panel would be a better candidate as it has the same width as editors.

When I tried to run a unit test with a breakpoint() statement, I was greeted with a Windows dialog that stated ‘Duplicate entries in “env”: Path’. This lead me to Github vscode/#10722, “Debugging test in VS Code does not work”. One of the comments suggests to add a specific configuration to launch.json and indeed, the workaround does the trick. I didn’t investigate that any further.

By the way, when I used the “Debug Console” in the bottom panel, I noticed some of the commands I’m used to don’t work. For example, c, short for continue, gives me a “name ‘c’ is not defined”. You have to use the VSCode Debug toolbar to jump over or into the next command, to continue etc. I think that VSCode comes with its own Python debugger and doesn’t use pdb.

I noticed that the Python test runner jumps to the function header of a failing test instead of the actual assertion failure. This seems like a very puzzling UI decision.

Furthermore, by default VSCode shows the test output in a Peek view, which makes the UI too “restless” for my liking, too “in your face”. I disabled that - set Settings | Features | Testing | Automatically Open Peek View to never.

About terminology, what Emacs calls a window, VSCode calls an editor. Just as you can split a window in Emacs, you can split an editor in VSCode. This creates a new “Editor Group” and by default, the new editor contains a new instance of the same file. So changes you make in the new editor aren’t automatically reflected in the original editor. To change this behavior and share open files between Editor Groups, select Settings | Workbench | Editor | Reveal If Open.

Reduce visual clutter

To minimize I closed the sidebar and removed the tabs that are shown on each editor. About the latter - remove check on Settings | Workbench | Editor | Show Tabs

Hide the indentation guides - uncheck Settings | Editor | Guides | Indentation

Disable automatic highlighting of current variable - uncheck Settings | Editor | Occurrences Highlight

Disable editor lightbulb - uncheck Settings | Editor | Lightbulb

Disable Git change indicates in the gutter - set Settings | SCM: Diff

Decorations Gutter Visibility to hover Not possible to disable, but enable on hover is a good compromise.

Relative line numbers - set Editor: Line Numbers to relative

Jump to beginning of function <ctrl> + <shif> + o followed by <enter>.

show problem hover: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60042135 <ctrl>+k <ctrl>+i or better <space> e e, and also g h

show Problems panel <ctrl>+<shift>+m This also switches to the panel. or better <space> e l

Final impressions

Appendix

Shortcuts

• Extension edamagit doesn’t pick up Git installed by Scoop, see this comment at GitHub edamagit/#243.
• Extension VSpaceCode “Select and run test” runs all tests instead of just the test at the cursor.

Settings files

VSCode maintains its settings in 2 files:

%APPDATA%/Code/User/settings.json

general, user-specific VSCode settings

.vscode/settings.json

project-specific settings

Miscellaneous notes

Ctrl+Shift+E switches focus to Explorer. When you are already in the Explorer, it switches to the editor that had the focus.

Ctrl+Shift+F switches focus to Search (in files). I reconfigured it to automatically collapse the search results by file - set Settings | Features | Search | Collapse Results to alwaysCollapse.

<ctrl>+0 switches to the sidebar, <ctrl>+1 switches to the editor that had the focus.