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Notepad++ vs Visual Studio/Code?

E

etherealfocus

Senior member
I'm a front end web coder and currently a Notepad++ user. However some of my projects are getting complex enough that I'm wondering about the benefits of something that helps with management as well as code-level features like code completion.

Just downloaded the VS2015 prerelease and it's definitely gonna take some getting used to, but so far it seems like it might do what I'm looking for.

I don't have much experience with full-featured IDEs - last one I used was Borland C++ back in the dark ages. lol

I also stumbled across this plugin for VS2012 - http://vswebessentials.com/

Is it still a big deal for VS2015 or is most of what it does rolled into VS now?

I also grabbed the VS 2015 Code editor which at first glance seems pretty similar to N++. Any major differentiators I should be aware of? The MS site isn't giving me a lot to go on.
 
Take a look at Jetbrain's Intellij/Webstorm/... as well

For Visual Studio, I had to use their Resharper plugin (seems it's .net only) to be a lot more productive


IDEs make you more productive, but you need to know how to use it.... For my java stuff, Intellij + Alt-Enter/Alt-Insert is my best friend, but I still use emacs/N++ on random stuff (json/xml/...). Could probably setup Intellij to do the same things as N++ (via plugin), but N++ is easier to work with as a scratchspace and it's already set up for that purpose.
 
full blown IDE - intelliJ is by far my favorite. i do javascript (and css/html/groovy) development in it and it owns. code completion in it works wonderfully, and we have A LOT of js files.

text editor - sublime text 2 is my favorite. very light weight and fast. and there are a ton of plugins for it that will help with code completion and it has vcs as well.

tbh, i would not use visual studio at all unless i had to. and i flat out will NOT use eclipse - that is the worst piece of crap software i've ever used.
 
purbeast0 said:
full blown IDE - intelliJ is by far my favorite. i do javascript (and css/html/groovy) development in it and it owns. code completion in it works wonderfully, and we have A LOT of js files.

text editor - sublime text 2 is my favorite. very light weight and fast. and there are a ton of plugins for it that will help with code completion and it has vcs as well.

tbh, i would not use visual studio at all unless i had to. and i flat out will NOT use eclipse - that is the worst piece of crap software i've ever used.
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Agree, i hate eclipse. It's tragic.

I use JetBrains PHPStorm for my web projects.

I do use Visual Studio at work though for the odd this and that. I'm employed as a systems administrator, but end up doing some programming work in IIS or with C# if the need arises.
 
paperwastage said:
IDEs make you more productive, but you need to know how to use it....
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:thumbsup: The only IDE I've successfully gotten used to in the past 10 years is NetBeans. And since I don't do much Java anymore I've forgotten how to use it.

purbeast0 said:
and i flat out will NOT use eclipse - that is the worst piece of crap software i've ever used.
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It's good to know I'm not the only one who thinks this. 🙂

Mostly nowadays I just use GViM.

I imagine a really successful web development IDE these days would either have to be a browser plugin or include a rendering engine. And preferably FTP support as well. Is there any such product right now? Firebug, and similar built-in browser features, are nice, but they don't include management of an entire project (do they?)
 
firebug is complete garbage. i'm the reason that pretty much everyone on my project now uses chrome dev tools instead of firebug, they just didn't know how great it was.

as far as rendering engines, i don't know if they have any of those. i've never used one. but you would want to test stuff in the actual browsers though anyways, because you never know how it will actually work even when emulating stuff.

not sure what you mean about ftp. with web development, you aren't modifying files then uploading them to a server. you are running a server locally on your machine and hitting that in the browser. so all you do is make your changes, save, then refresh the browser.

server changes you might have to restart the server, but groovy hot-swapping works pretty well for the most parts. it will recompile jsut the file you edited and usually works.
 
purbeast0 said:
firebug is complete garbage. i'm the reason that pretty much everyone on my project now uses chrome dev tools instead of firebug, they just didn't know how great it was.
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I've seen some of chrome dev tools. It's good, and it may have gotten better, but my stupid Linux distro (Linux Mint Debian) stopped updating Chromium around version 34. I recently managed to update to V37, but haven't looked at it much. I really need a new machine with more than 4GB RAM to run Chrome/Chromium regularly.

The main thing I couldn't do in Chrome Dev Tools was write new CSS to be added to the page. Has that changed?

purbeast0 said:
not sure what you mean about ftp. with web development, you aren't modifying files then uploading them to a server. you are running a server locally on your machine and hitting that in the browser.
Click to expand...

Not in my case. I download files from the dev server, edit them, and upload them to the dev server to test them.
 
Ken g6 said:
I've seen some of chrome dev tools. It's good, and it may have gotten better, but my stupid Linux distro (Linux Mint Debian) stopped updating Chromium around version 34. I recently managed to update to V37, but haven't looked at it much. I really need a new machine with more than 4GB RAM to run Chrome/Chromium regularly.

The main thing I couldn't do in Chrome Dev Tools was write new CSS to be added to the page. Has that changed?



Not in my case. I download files from the dev server, edit them, and upload them to the dev server to test them.
Click to expand...

i guess it depends how often you are making changes.

if that is a constant working project, that seems extremely inefficient. there is absolutely no point to make a change, upload it, make a change, upload it, etc, when you can make a change and refresh your browser that is pointing to a localhost with your server running.

kind of sounds like your dev server is acting as a repo.
 
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