By hrbrmstr
Microsoft’s newfound desire to make themselves desirable to the hipster development community has caused them to make many things open and/or free of late. One of these manifestations is Visual Studio Code, an Atom-ish editor for us code jockeys. I have friends at Microsoft and the Revolution R folks are there now, so I try to give things from Redmond a shot more than I previously would, especially when they make things for Mac.
VS code is so much like Atom (or even Sublime Text) that I won’t go into a full review of it. Suffice it to say it has a file selector pane, editor panes, output panes, snippets, theme support and is pretty extensible. One requirement I appreciate is that it forces you to think of code in terms of projects (you select a directory to edit in) and I also appreciate that they made git a first-class citizen.
Since I do not spend much time building large, compiled applications (this—along with web apps—seems to be VS Code’s sweet spot) there isn’t much initial appeal for me. It also lacks the “intellisense” support for the main language I use (R) so I’m left with basic syntax highlighting (the 90’s called and want their basic editor capabilities back).
None of that would initially drive me away from using something like VS Code and I may end up using it for HTML/CSS/JavaScript projects or even fire it up when I need to do some work in Python or Go. But I won’t be using it for R any time soon. While the aforementioned lack of “intellisense” for R is an issue, I don’t rely on the auto-completion for R but it does occasionally speed up typing and definitely helps with the more esoteric function definitions in equally esoteric packages.
The biggest show-stopper …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com