Visual Studio v/s VS code? | IDE or Editor?| Find out what you need! | Make an informed Choiceđź‘Ť
Have you often come across a point where you were confused about what to use when it comes to writing code. Our environment plays a huge role in defining who we are and how we grow as a person. So similarly our coding environment also affects our coding experience and plays a crucial role in defining our coding potential.
You might have often came across the term IDE and coding editor. But are you sure about you knowing the difference between them?
IDE or Code Editor? Visual Studio or VS code?
If you weren’t knowing it before then let me tell you that VS code or Visual Studio Code is an editor while Visual Studio is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
I’m addressing this fact because VS code feels more like an IDE than just an editor. Visual Studio is an IDE because it comes with built in support for editor, compilers, interpreters, intellisense, and many other features but VS code doesn’t comes packed with all of these.
However just like Visual Studio allows to install extensions to extend the features and functionality of the IDE same goes true for VS code also. So we can install various extensions to extend the features of VS code by installing the different types of extensions to suit our need. However the part which is painful or has to be done separately in case of VS code is installing and configuring the different language supports. But once you are done with it, you’ll be in a whole new world of coding experience.
VS code
That’s how our editor VS code looks like. Don’t worry about the colors they are highly customizable. That’s how VS code looks with the basic layout featuring: Editor, Sidebar, Status Bar, Activity Bar, and Panels just like any other modern code editor.
Visual Studio
That’s how our IDE Visual Studio looks like. You have different explorers here to explore various inbuilt feature sets. They are:
- Solution Explorer to view, navigate, and manage your code files.
- The editor window to write code or design an interface. Designing interface can’t be done is VS code.
- Team Explorer to keep track of work items and share code with others using Git and other version controlling tools.
What Microsoft say about VS code?
With the above statement we can conclude that VS code is a much better software tool for someone who is into Web Development. VS code comes with inbuilt support for Node.js development with JavaScript and TypeScript.
Other than that the feature of VS code which you should consider is it being lightweight in terms of resources consumption such as RAM and processor usage.
What Microsoft says about Visual Studio?
The Visual Studio integrated development environment is a creative launching pad that you can use to edit, debug, and build code, and then publish an app.
Visual Studio includes compilers, code completion tools, graphical designers, and many more features to ease the software development process. — Microsoft
Check it here : Visual Studio
With the above statement it is evident that Visual Studio is a complete package. It’s everything you need to complete an entire software development process, starting from editing the code to debugging it, building it and then even publishing it.
Conclusion
Visual Studio can do almost everything that VS code can. Remember that VS code is just an editor whereas Visual Studio is editor plus other things we discussed. However, most of the time everything is what you need. VS code along with extension is nothing less than an IDE.
In general, VS code is more of a personalized IDE. Pick what you need, leave what you don’t.
So who should or should not use what or what not is definitely a choice which depends on the requirement or type of task someone has to do. However, to simplify things I will try to categorize the users into categories as VS code users and Visual Studio users. And yes you thought it right if you did! By VS code I mean a modern code editor and by referring to Visual Studio I mean a modern IDE.
If you are system is not packed with high end specs then I’ll prefer you to stick with VS code. You can achieve a lot of your development tasks just by extending the capabilities of VS code via extensions in VS code.
Minimum Hardware Requirement for VS code is something which your system can definitely fulfill if it can run a web browser where you read an article. But also keep that in mind that the minimum requirements are not always what is required to perform our tasks. Minimum requirements are the requirements that are just required for the application to run with just bare bone and skeletons. Extensions also take their own memory.
Visual Studio Code is a small download (< 100 MB) and has a disk footprint of 200 MB.
Minimum Hardware requirement for VS code recommended by Microsoft:
1.6 GHz or faster processor
1 GB of RAM
Minimum Hardware Requirement for Visual Studio is sometimes quite overwhelming and puts the system under a lot of stress. Multitasking becomes tough because of how heavy Visual Studio feels on system. So carefully analyze that if you really need an IDE or not.
1.8 GHz or faster processor. Quad-core or better recommended
2 GB of RAM; 8 GB of RAM recommended (2.5 GB minimum if running on a virtual machine)
Hard disk space: Minimum of 800MB up to 210 GB of available space, depending on features installed; typical installations require 20–50 GB of free space.
Hard disk speed: to improve performance, install Windows and Visual Studio on a solid state drive (SSD).
Video card that supports a minimum display resolution of 720p (1280 by 720); Visual Studio will work best at a resolution of WXGA (1366 by 768) or higher.
I hope I had filled you up with enough details to make an informed decision on choosing between an IDE or an Editor while doing some development or programming tasks.
Thank You for your time reading it :) Have a nice day.
