I've been thinking about writing an article about the new Microsoft he's running for a long time. Satya Nadella, which is very different from that evil company that exercises its monopoly everywhere wanting to cover most of the market, but for one reason or another I have not organized the ideas and I have reflected them in this blog.
I clarify, it is not that now the Redmond people have become the good guys in the movie, or that they have stopped executing monopolistic acts, but it cannot be denied that in recent times we have witnessed a series of actions and changes that at least they give a lot to think about.
Some of the changes
You may be wondering what changes am I talking about? Well, I start with the most important of all: Microsoft has begun to listen to its users. At first glance, it is no longer that company that decided to implement something in Windows and it stayed that way no matter how much its users protested (such as when they left the start menu), and Windows 10 It is the best example of this.
In Windows 10 itself they have implemented a series of changes that are at least interesting, for example, the way of managing the network is very similar to NetworkManager up to a point, and finally, by resizing the window of the CMD, this does not remain in a small fixed frame ... many will know what I am talking about.
For with him OpenSource some interesting changes have also been made. We already saw how Microsoft recognizes Debian as an excellent platform to deploy your project Azure, a cloud service that if you doubt, I believe that in the coming years will be the main source of income for this company. In addition, it is said that applications can be created in ASP.NET 5 with Linux support.
Believe it or not (and I did not believe it myself), Microsoft has been collaborating or working directly on a bunch of OpenSource projects, trying to be in some way a "much more open" company.
But as we say around here, I don't put my hands in the fire for anyone. With this that I have said previously I do not mean (worth the redundancy), that Microsoft that was bad before is now good. I am just acknowledging in a way the good decisions they have been making as of late. And this is where I come in with the initial topic of this article: Visual Studio Code.
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft surprised a lot of people by making available to everyone, free of charge, Visual Studio Code, which I still don't know if it is an advanced text editor or an IDE, but it seems very, very familiar to me. SublimeText, Atom o brackets, not only in appearance, but in some of its options and functionalities. In fact, it is written using TypeScript / JavaScript and makes use of NodeJS. As an interesting fact, it has support to manage our Git repository.
Visual Studio Code (aka VSCode) supports a lots of languages which it offers syntax highlighting, including: Batch, C ++, Closure, Coffee Script, DockerFile, F #, Go, Jade, Java, HandleBars, Ini, Moon, makefile, Markdown, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, Python,R,Razor, Ruby, SQL, VisualBasic, XML. In addition, it has autocompletion for CSS, HTML, JavaScript, JSON, Less, Sass and refactoring for C# y TypeScript.
Regarding customization, it offers a light and a dark theme, and in the case of GNU / Linux we can manually edit the file:
$HOME/.config/Code/User/settings.json.
and add certain options. In addition, it has many keyboard shortcuts to make life easier. You can read all this on the Documentation website.
Although it is not an OpenSource tool as far as I know, it has a license quite permissive to some extent for the benefit of developers. For example:
- General. You can use the software to develop and test your applications.
- Demo use. The uses permitted above include the use of the software in the demonstration of your applications.
- Backup copy. You can make a backup copy of the software, to reinstall the software.
- The software contains third party components licensed under open source licenses with obligations of source code availability. Copies of these licenses are included in the ThirdPartyNotices file or accompanying credits file. You may obtain the corresponding full source code from us if and as required under the relevant open source licenses by sending a money order or check for $ 5.00 to: Source Code Compliance Team, Microsoft Corporation, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 USA
Although not everything is rosy, as the same license says:
- DATA. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. For this pre-release version, users cannot opt ​​out of data collection. Some of the features of the software may allow the collection of data from the users of the applications that are developed with the software. If you use these features to enable data collection in your applications, you must comply with applicable laws, including providing appropriate notices to users of your applications. You can learn more about data collection and its use in the help documentation and privacy statement at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=528096&clcid=0x409. The use of the software acts as your consent to these practices.
These are some of the more interesting things that I read about said license, and since I am not a lawyer, I cannot determine if it is a good thing or a bad thing. But anyway.
Download and install Visual Studio Code
Archlinux users can install Visual Studio Code from AUR:
$ yaourt -S vscode-bin
However, there is no need to do so since we only have to download the compressed file that they offer us on their website, and execute the binary it contains. And that's it.
Visual Studio Code Conclusions
Is it worth leaving the options that we have today in GNU / Linux that are open and free by VSCode? Of course not, but truth be told, at least for my work as FrontEnd, VSCode is an excellent tool (although I repeat, I have not explored it 100%).
It is also worth clarifying that it is not a final version, so the Software may present errors, however so far I have not had any problems using it. Its interface is quite friendly and it works quite fast.
What is not OpenSource? I repeat, I do not know if it is completely closed, but it uses open technologies and at the end of the day, how many use Opera or similar applications? Therefore, it is to everyone's taste.