VS Code as your IDE?

[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

Anyone doing this?  My team has decided (no idea who exactly, but they got supervisor buy off), to use VS Code, and load a bunch of extensions in it for script development.  I’ve never used it before, but it looks cumbersome and convoluted to me.

 

Joe Heaton

Managed Services and Operational Support Unit

Information Technology Operations Branch

Data and Technology Division

CA Department of Fish and Wildlife

 

[Gordon Pegue]

Back when I was gainfully employed (I am retired now and merely lurk here), I actually found the tool to be quite useful Joe. The learning curve was not steep at all and the debugger was my favorite feature. Another very useful feature is that it is not limited to PS. JavaScript? Yep. C++? Yep. Python? Yep!! And a lot of other code bases…

Someone on your team sees it as useful, I suspect you will too once you get over the initial learning hump and actually use the tools capabilities.

Gordon

Distressed electrons pushed out by my iPhone

On Feb 12, 2026, at 9:40 AM, 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntpowershell <ntpowe...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Belanger, Xavier B]

Hi,

I'm not using VS Code but having reviewed some of the information around it I would recommend some caution.

The application itself is likely reliable and secure, as long as your maintaining it up-to-date with the patches provided by Microsoft.

The extensions are not covered by Microsoft patches; it's a similar situation then the risk introduced by web browser extensions. Some may be good, other would be bad (or straightforward nefarious).

 [ https://blog.palantir.com/managing-and-securing-vs-code-extensions-at-scale-b75b2cf72b02 ]

 [ https://www.securityblue.team/blog/posts/malicious-vs-code-extensions-data-exfiltration ]

The risk is that VS code can be configured to access additional resources and systems (such as SSH access to an internal server to push fresh code) and it's also a pretty popular tool, so bad actors are leveraging this to steal information and potentially spread beyond the user's workstation.

Plus, from a personal standpoint, I found that VS Code is using a lot of resources for what I would expect from a code editor.

All in all, I would suggest looking at better alternatives.

Sincerely,

-- 
Xavier Belanger

IT Security Architect | CISSP | Office of Information Security

University of North Carolina Wilmington

 

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From: 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntpowershell <ntpowe...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2026 11:40
To: ntpowe...@googlegroups.com <ntpowe...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [ntpowershell] VS Code as your IDE?

 

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[Wright, John M]

I’m not.  All my scripts are Powershell.  Personally, I like to keep things simple.  Maybe you can do that and still use vscode.

 

It looks like it has AI built in.  That might save a lot of time.  But I hope no one trusts it very much.

 

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From: 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntpowershell <ntpowe...@googlegroups.com>
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Subject: [ntpowershell] VS Code as your IDE?

 

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[Michael B. Smith]

My preferred editor is actually vim. As an editor, it’s far more powerful than vscode.

 

However, the built-in debugging add-ins for PowerShell and C mean that I use vscode a lot.

 

Vim can do keyword highlighting and brace matching and lots of other things, but it just doesn't (as far as I know) do LSP syntax checking natively (there is a python plug-in to do it, but I found it really slow).

 

Vscode is fat and bloated for an editor. It’s got a crap-load of features you will probably never use. And it gets more of those every month.

 

I would also strongly recommend that you only use Microsoft (or vetted third party) add-ins for vscode.

 

From: 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntpowershell <ntpowe...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2026 11:41 AM
To: ntpowe...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ntpowershell] VS Code as your IDE?

 

Anyone doing this?  My team has decided (no idea who exactly, but they got supervisor buy off), to use VS Code, and load a bunch of extensions in it for script development.  I’ve never used it before, but it looks cumbersome and convoluted to me.

--

[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

Thank everyone for all the great responses.

 

Michael, as a follow up, a coworker asked me if you’re using the ancient vim emulator, or if you’re using a vim extension in vscode?

 

From: ntpowe...@googlegroups.com <ntpowe...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Michael B. Smith

Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2026 10:35 AM
To: ntpowe...@googlegroups.com

Subject: [ntpowershell] RE: VS Code as your IDE?

 

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[Michael B. Smith]

TIL that there was a vim extension for vscode. VSCodeVIM seems pretty buggy, based on their github. And the neovim hack just adds more overhead.

 

I use the traditional www.vim.org Vim. Version 9.1. I knew the original author (when he was alive) back when I was an Amiga programmer.

 

If I was going to switch, I’d go to neovim as it does have LSP support.

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