It took perhaps five minutes after I finished my last post about starting fresh on a new Mac until I realized I will not want to standardize on Visual studio code as my One Editor for all types of text.
So what sin did it commit so quickly and completely as to immediately be beyond forgiveness?
Its cross-platform nature reared its ugly head in the worst possible way: Visual studio code has built its editing component in such a way that it can not support text services.
Sure, but what does that mean?
Services are one of many ways of automating things in Macos. I have created a few for myself which I have hooked into system-wide shortcuts. My most used one, by far, takes the URL from the active Safari tab and turns the currently selected text in the active application into a Markdown-style link to that URL. I use that dozens of times every time I write show notes for a new podcast episode, and I typically write show notes for a new podcast episode twice per week.
I am not sure where in the chain of technology Visual studio code breaks things. At first I thought I was doing something wrong setting up my service, as it was simply not showing up in the services menu (nor responding to my keyboard shortcut). But then, I noticed the shortcut working perfectly in other apps, fed Google a few words, and voila: an open bug about the problem, including some poor person working around it by entering text into the find dialog and running their service from there.
Did I mention the bug was opened in June, of 2017?
Clearly this is not worthy of a good text editor, nor of a good platform citizen.
I now face the fun question of whether I simply go back to Sublime text for non-code text editing, or if I should try some other more focused Markdown editor. Since Code will stay around for, well, code, my other editor definitely does not need all of the power Sublime provides. Tips are welcome!
Now, perhaps I should configure my shell aliases a bit more?