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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. CodePen vs Visual Studio Code

CodePen vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CodePen
CodePen
Stacks160
Followers233
Votes0
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

CodePen vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between CodePen and Visual Studio Code, two popular tools used by developers for coding and development purposes.

  1. CodePen: Collaborative Online Code Editor for web development: CodePen is an online code editor and community for front-end developers to write and share HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code snippets. It provides an easy-to-use interface with built-in features like live preview, code sharing, collaboration, and integration with popular web development libraries and frameworks. CodePen is primarily designed for quickly prototyping and sharing web-related code snippets and projects.

  2. Visual Studio Code: Powerful Code Editor with Rich Features: Visual Studio Code, often referred to as VS Code, is a lightweight but powerful source code editor developed by Microsoft. It offers extensive features and functionality for various programming languages and frameworks. VS Code provides a customizable user interface, integrated terminal, debugging support, version control integration, and a wide range of extensions to enhance the editor's capabilities. It is designed for professional software development and offers a robust and comprehensive environment for coding, debugging, and collaboration.

  3. CodePen: Online-only Environment: CodePen is an online platform that runs entirely in the browser. Users can access and work on their code projects from any device with an internet connection using the CodePen website. It provides a convenient way to share code snippets with others and collaborate in real-time without requiring any local installation or setup. However, as an online-only environment, CodePen may have limitations in terms of performance, offline availability, and dependency on the stability of the internet connection.

  4. Visual Studio Code: Local Code Editor with Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Features: Visual Studio Code is a local code editor that needs to be installed on the user's system. It provides a fully-fledged integrated development environment (IDE) experience with advanced features like IntelliSense code completion, powerful debugging capabilities, built-in Git support, and extensive language support through extensions. Being a local editor, VS Code allows developers to work offline and gives them more control over their development environment.

  5. CodePen: Simplified Code Editing and Prototyping: CodePen focuses on simplicity and ease of use for web developers who want to quickly prototype and experiment with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It provides a clean and minimalistic coding interface where developers can focus on writing code and previewing the output in real-time. CodePen's simplicity makes it a popular choice for beginners and those who prefer a straightforward environment for web development.

  6. Visual Studio Code: Extensibility and Customization: One of the standout features of Visual Studio Code is its extensibility and customization options. VS Code allows developers to install a wide range of extensions from the marketplace, enabling them to tailor the editor to their specific needs and preferences. These extensions can add support for additional programming languages, provide advanced debugging tools, integrate with cloud platforms and services, and enhance the overall development experience. With VS Code's extensibility, developers can create a personalized coding environment that suits their workflow and requirements.

In summary, while CodePen is primarily an online code editor focused on web development prototyping and collaboration, Visual Studio Code offers a comprehensive local coding environment with powerful features, extensibility, and customization options for professional software development.

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Advice on CodePen, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Simon
Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

CodePen
CodePen
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

It is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers.. It functions as an online code editor and open-source learning environment, where developers can create code snippets, creatively named "pens", and test them.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

-
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
160
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
233
Followers
169.1K
Votes
0
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Cons
  • 4
    No support for any other git-server than github
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to CodePen, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Red Hat Codeready Workspaces

Red Hat Codeready Workspaces

Built on the open Eclipse Che project, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces provides developer workspaces, which include all the tools and the dependencies that are needed to code, build, test, run, and debug applications.

AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9

Cloud9 provides a development environment in the cloud. Cloud9 enables developers to get started with coding immediately with pre-setup environments called workspaces, collaborate with their peers with collaborative coding features, and build web apps with features like live preview and browser compatibility testing. It supports more than 40 languages, with class A support for PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript/Node.js, and Go.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Koding

Koding

Koding is a feature rich cloud-based development environment complete with free VMs, an attractive IDE & sudo level terminal access!

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

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