This afternoon, a friend was trying to convince me to switch over to VS Code as my text editor of choice. His argument was that it was faster than my current text editor of choice, Atom and that he enjoyed it a lot.
I’ve heard a lot of other devs swear by VS Code as well in the past and I’ve given it an honest shot a few times but I just can’t get into it. VS Code might be quicker to boot and load, but I found that there were just too many things I was tweaking out of the box and I just cannot get over the layout of the UI.
I gave my friend the benefit of the doubt and tried hard to dev in VS Code for a few hours today but I just couldn’t do it. I’m sure if I could get the editor tweaked after a days it might feel better. But to me, the most important thing a tool should do is, provide the features to do what you need to do and then get out of your way.
After my few hours of tweaking and trying to get acclimated with VS Code, I gave up, fired up Atom and got to programming.
Which made me think about tools in general. I think I’ve got the tendency to be like Dug in Up getting distracted from the work at hand because a new shiny tool (or in Dug’s case a squirrel) shows up. Just recently Apple released updated models of their Macbook and iMac lines and I really, really wanted to upgrade. But when I thought about it, for programming and some light design work, my aging 2009 Macbook Pro works just fine.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times when an alternative to a tool you’re using is far better. But most of the time the tool you’ve got is just fine for what you’re trying to do and you probably shouldn’t hop on the hype train. Ignore the other tools, focus on what you’ve got and stay productive.