KDevelop 5.2 Beta Brings New Heap Profiler, Better C++ & PHP Support

[Steffo]

I think I asked on the forum, but probably I didn't get the answer because I don't remember it. So, anyway, I've always wondered: how is Visual Studio Code any better than, say, Kate?

I tried VS Code at my ex-job once expecting it to open Visual Studio projects, was disappointed, played around a bit, and came to conclusion it's just another code editor, one of many others. I am obviously not comparing it to IDE-like editors like gvim (or whatever folks nowadays are using — Neovim?) or Emacs, but comparing to Kate I see Kate is more featured. It supports huge number of languages, encodings, and does even have the mini-map of Sublime Text.

VS Code doesn't just do syntax highlighting. You can install from VS Code several thousands plugins. I. e., I develop in python with code completion. I can jump from function to function and source to source just by pressing CMD + left click on a function. I can install a linter like pylint and so on. AND: I can debug!

You can turn VS Code with just one or two plugins into a fully featured IDE. Thus, I came to the rather opposite conclusion than you.

[jaxxed]

Steffo is right here.

VS Code doesn't just do syntax highlighting. You can install from VS Code several thousands plugins. I. e., I develop in python with code completion. I can jump from function to function and source to source just by pressing CMD + left click on a function. I can install a linter like pylint and so on. AND: I can debug!

You can turn VS Code with just one or two plugins into a fully featured IDE. Thus, I came to the rather opposite conclusion than you.

even this code navigation/discovery is only half of it.

IDEs offer impressive integration with:

1. syntax highlighting and validation (and cleanup if you trust it)
2. code discovery/navigation
3. code versioning (diff/push/pull and even something like git-flow)
4. environment (local/dev/stage/production) management for specific project settings, source code pushing, data/state pulling
5. CI and Build -> even for the web, having Travis/GitHub and Docker build integration is pretty handy.

For web specific you can get:
6. easy xdebug/profiler integration

Kate has options for much of this, but it's web-side tools have been deprecated for years. Note that Kate is just an implementation of the same backend as KDevelop, so you can likely switch to KDevelop without worrying.

But:

- sublime has thousands of plugins, as do the JetBrains (paid) products, and eclipse beats them all
- all of the IDE level tools have some kind of linting integration option.
- many of the options are open source, so you can contribute in a community (plugins, source, documentation)
- most of the options allow you to disable the user tracking built into the software

[jaxxed]

you know what I miss from kate/kdev that other IDEs don't have: open files as a vertical list, instead of a tabset. Tabs for "open files" is pretty useless really, as any deep dependency dive leaves you with a list so long, that it is easier to jsut try to open the file again instead of trying to find it in the tab list. Kate could keep that as a hierarchical list, which was really handy.

[Hi-Angel]

VS Code doesn't just do syntax highlighting. You can install from VS Code several thousands plugins. I. e., I develop in python with code completion. I can jump from function to function and source to source just by pressing CMD + left click on a function. I can install a linter like pylint and so on. AND: I can debug!

You can turn VS Code with just one or two plugins into a fully featured IDE. Thus, I came to the rather opposite conclusion than you.

I must admit, Kate plugins are for some reason scattered around the internet without a single repository. As for the rest: from a quick search you can navigate and complete the code at least with the pretty standard ctags plugin, shipped with the editor (ctags supports 41 language, including python).

Just, don't get me wrong, I'm actually annoyed because there is a bunch of open source editors around, and every single one of them supports plugins. But some peoples took the editor which is new, proprietary, and with amount of functionality by default even less than the opponents, instead of using and extending existing open source projects. This is what I really don't understand.

[Hi-Angel]

jaxxed yay, notifications of moderated posts are finally working!

you know what I miss from kate/kdev that other IDEs don't have: open files as a vertical list, instead of a tabset. Tabs for "open files" is pretty useless really, as any deep dependency dive leaves you with a list so long, that it is easier to jsut try to open the file again instead of trying to find it in the tab list. Kate could keep that as a hierarchical list, which was really handy.

Yeah, I feel your pain — when I had to work with Visual Studio (not Code) on my ex-job, navigating between opened files was quickly getting real hard. I like the way it works in my Emacs (ido-switch-buffer) and Vim (FuzzyFinder, I guess, not sure) — I'm pressing a hotkey, getting the list of files, and typing an infix thus filtering out non-matching filenames.

[Steffo]

Just, don't get me wrong, I'm actually annoyed because there is a bunch of open source editors around, and every single one of them supports plugins. But some peoples took the editor which is new, proprietary, and with amount of functionality by default even less than the opponents, instead of using and extending existing open source projects. This is what I really don't understand.

This is also not true. VS Code is open source and hosted on Github!

[Hi-Angel]

This is also not true. VS Code is open source and hosted on Github!

Wow, that's a news, I didn't know it

[Steffo]

Wow, that's a news, I didn't know it

It gets even crazier! The plugins communicate via an open json protocol to VS Code. That means: Any IDE which supports this protocol, can ran VS Code plugins! There are some IDEs like Eclipse which want to support this protocol.