For the past few months I’ve been making heavy use of Visual Studio Code’s Remote Development extension. It’s incredibly impressive to be honest. It’s pretty amazing to transparently work in different environments. I’ve used it connected to a Linux VM initially, then recently connected to a real Linux machine.

Because editing is happening locally, I find it hides a good chunk of latency, which is also really nice. Editing feels about as fast as it does locally, even when you’re having network challenges (like I do locally, alas). One downside for me is that I got pretty used to using opendiff for dealing with merges, but I’m finding that using plain text merge resolution + VSCode’s semantic diff understanding is pretty good.

I really should say, overall, I’ve gotten quite happy with my VSCode setup. I have clang-format running on file save, which I don’t understand how I lived with before. Intellisense results range from amazing to garbage, seemingly depending on the day; I suspect I do a lot of bad things to the poor engine jumping between heads all the time.

As a Firefox developer, I feel I should be more annoyed that it’s built on Electron (and therefore Chrome), but honestly, for a free development environment it blows my socks off, and so I can’t ride that high horse too long.