Least grating dev environment for ESP32 devices
After many years of hating the ESP32 family (largely on principle, not for any good reasons!), I decided make a start getting to know the platform better. I've done a few things on it and it was pretty easy to get started.
Some time on from the starting point and I still can't work out what the best development environment to work in is. Arduino IDE is not a serious contender so let's exclude that. The remaining two which are fully supported are ESP-IDE and VS Code. I generally work in Linux - Ubuntu or Fedora.
Personally, I favour ESP-IDE because it's a real IDE but it doesn't seem to work very well! Although it wasn't recently, I was using Eclipse 20 years ago commercially so it's got a very slim path of resistance. That said, VS Code is very popular these days although I don't personally like it. It's hard to say why, but I think it comes down to disliking the "black magic" that happens behind the scenes which drives these plug-ins that I depend on but which I just don't understand. The plug-in marketplace seems to be a mess of things that all do the same thing and that Microsoft could have just written themselves to avoid it. It's sort of like Amazon returning the Chineseum brand of toilet paper instead of the one that you want and is popular in your country.
That said, I'm not averse to learning a new environment and may eventually understand these things or alternatively, I'll work out what's going wrong in Eclipse. I did wonder what anyone else's thoughts were or if there's something secret that I've been missing all along!