James Smith

Don't use VSCode

Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform editor that has taken the programming world by storm: it's used by about 73% of respondents to a StackOverflow survey in 2023. And what's not to like? It's flexible, fast, very extensible and it's open source in addition to all of this!

Except ... when it's not. There are some technical down-sides to VSCode (especially if you don't have an expensive modern computer), and much of what makes VSCode exceptionally useful isn't actually open source and could be detrimental to the ecosystem as a whole.

I will spend some time in this talk going over the pros and cons of VSCode, its useful features for developers in general and Pythonistas in particular, and importantly the caveats, why I think that it's best avoided.

I will end with an impassioned plea to the local Python community to rely primarily on properly free (libre) software tools for the bulk of their development, I'll demonstrate some of the ones I use, and briefly mention a few other alternatives.