I have been working on a PowerShell and SQL-heavy project at work for about a week now. To facilitate PowerShell development, I installed and configured Visual Studio Code, which is Microsoft’s Electron-based code editor. I was not a fan of Visual Studio Code (hereafter called, simply, Code), due mainly to its lumbering speed when compared to Sublime Text, and somewhat, too, due to its brutalist design aesthetic.

I must say, after using it for PowerShell development and debugging, that Code has grown on my quite a lot. I can develop, run, and debug PowerShell scripts in an IDE environment, edit Markdown files, and can even run SQL commands against my SQL Server Express instance (though query running is really slow compared to SQL Server Management Studio). There are many, many powerful extensions—way more than I would have expected. Some of them let me do other useful things, like convert delimited files to Excel right in the editor, that just aren’t possible in Sublime Text.

There are some drawbacks, though. RAM use is extremely high—nearly a gig even when there is only one file open—and runs, for me, about ten times as much RAM as Sublime Text uses. Also, it is really slow compared to Sublime Text. Loading even small files takes a few seconds, and I have to wait for syntax highlighting to be applied to the files after they are displayed in the editor for the first time. Still, I am liking it, and am using it, more and more.