My Front End Web Development setup, with Visual Studio Code.

Background: I’ve been using Visual Studio Code for about half a year now, after giving it a try at the insistence of other developers at the office. Prior to this I used Jetbrains WebStorm and PHPStorm.

The verdict: My experience so far has been extremely positive - out of the box VS Code is pretty capable, and with the correct mix of plugins it can match almost any other IDE I’ve otherwise used, but with a much smaller memory footprint and faster startup time.

The plugins that I use for Visual Studio Code are:

Functional plugins

• Auto Rename Tag
• ESLint
• Git Lens
• JavaScript Standard Style
• Sass
• TSLint

Language / Framework specific plugins

• Docker
• Vetur
• vue
• vue-beautify

In conclusion: Out of the box, WebStorm is awesome. But plugins are a core part of Visual Studio Code, and the correct mix of plugins can bring it at least on par, feature-by-feature, with the competition.

Comparing WebStorm and Visual Studio Code against each other, the only thing I’ve found to really distinguish them is that WebStorm has a more capable set of code refactoring and searching tools. Other than that, there’s nothing that I use day-to-day that’s missing.