Moving to Visual Studio Code from Android Studio

A guide for Flutter developers

Note: This article assumes that your familiar with Flutter development in Android Studio and that you’ve already installed Visual Studio Code and its Flutter and Dart plugins. These things are described clearly here.

Why switch?

I’ve been developing Android apps with Android Studio since it first came out. So when Flutter arrived, it felt very natural to keep using it. As Flutter begins to support more and more platforms, though, it’s starting to feel wrong to use an IDE called Android Studio.

It’s not only that. I’ve played around with Visual Studio Code a few times, and I like how light weight it is. It starts up right away and there’s a clean interface. Android Studio by comparison is much heavier, and while it doesn’t take terribly long to start up, it’s not an insignificant amount of time.

Besides, all the cool people use VS Code. OK, not really, but a lot of cool people are using it. They must have a reason, right?

Fine, I don’t have a good reason for switching. I just am.

How do I even start a new Flutter project?

In Android Studio it was easy. I just went to File > New > New Flutter Project.