Contents

Why Visual Studio Code

Contents

Why Visual Studio Code

Code editor morphing into an Integrated Development Environment.

Competition

Competitors include:

  • Spyder IDE, which has better support for data exploration

  • Atom, with a design similar to VS Code; however, with Microsoft buying GitHub in 2018, most of the improvements are now made to VS Code

  • PyCharm is a full-featured IDE. It offers slightly better refactoring options than VS Code. It requires a commercial license for some data science options, and is more heavy-weight than VS Code, but for its configuration and CPU/memory usage.

Advantages of VS Code:

  • integrates well with modern Python tooling

  • handles multiple languages (including LaTeX!)

  • many extensions for Python-related tools

  • quite lightweight, both in resource use and user interface

Disadvantages:

  • designed for a single editor window (with split code panes), and use with multiple monitors is messy

  • the extension ecosystem needs a bit of curation: for every task, there may be several plugins corresponding to it