Visual Studio Code vs npm

Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Visual Studio Code

Stacks186.5K

Followers169.1K

Votes2.3K

GitHub Stars178.2K

Forks35.9K

Visual Studio Code vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and npm (Node Package Manager) are popular tools used in web development. While both have their own functionalities, there are several key differences between them that set them apart.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE) vs Package Manager: Visual Studio Code is a powerful and feature-rich IDE that provides comprehensive tools for writing and editing code, debugging, and source control management. On the other hand, npm is a package manager that allows developers to install, manage, and share reusable code libraries and dependencies for their projects.
Supported Platforms: Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform IDE that supports Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. It provides the same features and functionality across all platforms, ensuring consistency for developers. In contrast, npm is a command-line tool that can be used on any platform where Node.js is installed, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Code Editing and Language Support: Visual Studio Code offers extensive language support and code editing capabilities, with syntax highlighting, code completion, and intelligent suggestions for various programming languages. It also provides built-in support for popular frameworks and tools. npm, on the other hand, is primarily focused on managing packages and dependencies and does not provide code editing features or language support.
Project Management: Visual Studio Code allows developers to create and manage projects, with features like file organization, workspace management, and task automation. It provides a comprehensive project structure and allows easy navigation between files and folders. npm, however, is not designed for project management and focuses solely on package management within a project.
Debugging and Testing: Visual Studio Code offers a built-in debugging tool that allows developers to debug their code, set breakpoints, and step through the code for troubleshooting and bug fixing. It also provides integrated testing capabilities for running unit tests and analyzing code coverage. npm does not have built-in debugging or testing functionality and relies on external tools and libraries for these purposes.
Extension Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a vast extension ecosystem, with a wide range of extensions available for enhanced functionality and integration with various frameworks, languages, and tools. These extensions can be easily installed and managed through the VS Code marketplace. npm, on the other hand, has a different type of package ecosystem, which focuses on packages and libraries that can be installed and used as dependencies in a project, rather than extending the functionality of the tool itself.

In summary, Visual Studio Code is a versatile integrated development environment that provides powerful code editing, debugging, and project management features, with extensive language support and a vast extension ecosystem. npm, on the other hand, is a package manager that simplifies the installation and management of code libraries and dependencies for web development projects.

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Advice on npm, Visual Studio Code

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

StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

npm

Yarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k

Comments

Mark

CTO at Gemsotec bvba

Apr 25, 2019

Reviewon

React

TypeScript

Yarn

I use npm because I also mainly use React and TypeScript. Since several typings (from DefinitelyTyped) depend on the React typings, Yarn tends to mess up which leads to duplicate libraries present (different versions of the same type definition), which hinders the Typescript compiler. Npm always resolves to a single version per transitive dependency. At least that's my experience with both.

251k views251k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

npm	Visual Studio Code
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.	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 17.6K	GitHub Stars 178.2K
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks 35.9K
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 186.5K
Followers 82.2K	Followers 169.1K
Votes 1.6K	Votes 2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 648 Best package management system for javascript 382 Open-source 327 Great community 148 More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist 112 Nice people matter Cons 5 Bad at package versioning and being deterministic 5 Problems with lockfiles 3 Node-gyp takes forever 1 Super slow	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 npm, Visual Studio Code?

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

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 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.

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

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.

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Browserify

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Brackets

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

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.

Yarn

Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

Related Comparisons

Visual Studio Code vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Integrated Development Environment (IDE) vs Package Manager: Visual Studio Code is a powerful and feature-rich IDE that provides comprehensive tools for writing and editing code, debugging, and source control management. On the other hand, npm is a package manager that allows developers to install, manage, and share reusable code libraries and dependencies for their projects.
Supported Platforms: Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform IDE that supports Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. It provides the same features and functionality across all platforms, ensuring consistency for developers. In contrast, npm is a command-line tool that can be used on any platform where Node.js is installed, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Code Editing and Language Support: Visual Studio Code offers extensive language support and code editing capabilities, with syntax highlighting, code completion, and intelligent suggestions for various programming languages. It also provides built-in support for popular frameworks and tools. npm, on the other hand, is primarily focused on managing packages and dependencies and does not provide code editing features or language support.
Project Management: Visual Studio Code allows developers to create and manage projects, with features like file organization, workspace management, and task automation. It provides a comprehensive project structure and allows easy navigation between files and folders. npm, however, is not designed for project management and focuses solely on package management within a project.
Debugging and Testing: Visual Studio Code offers a built-in debugging tool that allows developers to debug their code, set breakpoints, and step through the code for troubleshooting and bug fixing. It also provides integrated testing capabilities for running unit tests and analyzing code coverage. npm does not have built-in debugging or testing functionality and relies on external tools and libraries for these purposes.
Extension Ecosystem: Visual Studio Code has a vast extension ecosystem, with a wide range of extensions available for enhanced functionality and integration with various frameworks, languages, and tools. These extensions can be easily installed and managed through the VS Code marketplace. npm, on the other hand, has a different type of package ecosystem, which focuses on packages and libraries that can be installed and used as dependencies in a project, rather than extending the functionality of the tool itself.

Visual Studio Code vs npm

Overview

Visual Studio Code vs npm: What are the differences?