VSCode plugins and thoughts on alpha release

Question

So I'm starting to guess Javascript wasn't the best choice for VSCode to be based on. It is pretty much the same as SublimeText and even slower, though the debugger and code intel is awesome and far beyond Sublime's capabilities.

The thing is I suddenly got a chrome-like inspector frame on the right side of the window, which caught my attention and got me googling about it (too bad almost nobody is talking about vscode yet so it's a pain to even find some info), and found out another person got the same weird issue. Somebody told him that F12 opens the inspector like a normal web app so you can look under the hood (which os most likely bullcrap since it makes no sense, probably just a bug).

The thing is I decided to test out keypresses, and discovered Fn+Shift+Cmd+F12 opens a new window with a weird button and a web inspector, which has no utility at all, but it's there so I got curious and messed up with it for a while. Bad idea since it crashed the entire app.

All this story has the point of warning about how Javascript is not as stable and independent as Objective C, since it's obviously working on top of V8 and Webkit and whatnot, any of which multiply its chances to crash.

Sublime has also crashed for me a couple times, but it does Atom Saving (operating system's native autosave that stores every change in the filesystem so app crashes don't affect the files).

VSCode is not native and is in a very alpa state (version 0.1.0 as today), so this is kind of a feedback for them and a warning for other users, posted here because there is a link for this stackoverflow community on their website, and is the only community-driven way of feedback they have.

I wish they open the development so others can contribute or, at least, do like SublimeText which isn't open but supports extensibility thru plugins and python console.

Now, the question:

Is there a way to make Sublime plugins work here?

Answer 1

The keybindings you have found are used by us internally to debug VSCode quickly in case we notice a problem. We simply forgot to remove them, kind of like how Ctrl+Alt+Delete happened :).

We will remove these keybindings with our next update, to avoid confusion, in a couple of weeks.

We have plans on supporting plugins, we have made progress on this story, but we were not happy enough with the API, and we decided to further validate and improve it before making it public, to avoid as much as possible future API breakage.

As for the actual question, it is not possible to run Sublime plugins in VSCode, for similar reasons why it is not possible to run Sublime plugins in Eclipse or in Visual Studio. There is, however the possibility of code sharing between plugins developed for different platforms, see for example Omnisharp, which is shipped with VSCode and for which there is a Sublime plugin.

Answer 2

You're complaining about VSCode being created using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and not something like C# or Objective C. You do realize that since day one the following Apple apps were made with a similar hybrid approach of Objective C and HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These are apps that millions of people use: iOS: iTunes app, iTunes Store app, App Store, and on desktop: iTunes, App Store.

Visual Studio Code is a preview, meaning something that just left alpha stage development and is in early, early, early beta, like just a week ago. So there are lots of things that are still missing or not totally working yet. The Visual Studio team is working at three-week sprints and intend to update the product at that pace, so if you've downloaded it, don't expect it to have every possible feature yet. This is a preview. Explore it. If it doesn't fit your current workflow, don't use it. Stick with what you have. But keep an eye on it because it will evolve steadily over the coming months.