Hi guys so I’ve been thinking for a while now whether to switch to dart for mobile development or to stay with kotlin and this is mainly because of vscode support for dart. Don’t get me wrong I love kotlin but the developer’s have got to understand that a lot of people hate the intellij ide including android studio. So you know if a core dev is reading this can you please please and please create better vscode support for the majority of us that love it. Thank you
Needing something lightweight
I know this isn’t what your asking, but IntelliJ is getting a lightweight mode. The reason I want to bring this up is that it seems users requesting higher priority to support text editors like VSCode/Sublime/Atom/Notepad++ instead of fully tooled IDEs are really looking for a lightweight alternative.
Kotlin ideals line up well with a full IDE (it’s uncommon to want the barebones of an editor like VSCode). Turning VSCode into a full-blown IDE seems a bit redundant since we have IntelliJ and the great thing about a less-tooled editor like VSCode is how easy quick un-tooled changes are.
Here’s a quote about IntelliJ lightweight, but more importantly I think this kind of editing is what those using text editors are going for: more limitations and less tooling in exchange for more speed and less complexity:
The mode has certain limitations: it offers simpler code completion (or sometimes none at all), no code inspections, only basic code highlighting that doesn’t require sophisticated code analysis, and so on. But if you just need to open a single file, make a few changes, and save, LightEdit is the quickest way to do it, and you don’t have to use a third-party editor either.
My recommendation for getting more support in VSCode
There have been several discussions about supporting VSCode and Eclipse that echo your request of “please support this other tool more”.
My summary of those would be:
It’s nice JetBrains supports other tools at all. There are community efforts for support like Kotlin Language Server. A majority of Kotlin users prefer IntelliJ–and supporting that is higher priority than creating an IDE around a programmable text editor. Another fully tooled IDE might compete with JetBrains–we’d rather keep them around to improve Kotlin.
If you really want more support in VSCode, I’d recommend helping out with the VSCode Kotlin extension which is the same thing as the language server for Kotlin.
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Thanks will be sure to checkout the intellij lightweight and the vscode extension code