Another discussion of VS Code versus a classic text editor, this time Vim.
For the record, when I’m programming, I normally use Geany. It really is ready to use “out of the box” for all the languages I use. Most commonly, that’s the D programming language, and it has everything I want in the default installation. I think I configure a couple things on a new Geany install, setting tabs to two spaces, and moving the message window to the right so I get soft wrapping. That’s not language-specific, though, and it’s not something that happens very often.
Comments like this are pretty common in these discussions:
The amount of work needed to get a basic IDE up and running for your languages of choice, even for commonly used languages such as Python or Javascript, is far too much for someone who wants to get on with their day job or hobby coding and doesn’t want to spend precious hours fixing obscure issues in Lua.
I don’t particularly like vscode. It’s heavy and slow and janky, particularly on older laptops. I don’t like being sucked back into the Microsoft ecosystem after spending years getting away from it. But ultimately, I want to just get on with my job, and my job is not Lua Developer or Neovim Plugin Expert.
I agree with the comments about VS Code. I don’t like it either. The difference is that I don’t like VS Code out of the box. It kind of sucks in my opinion. Nothing in particular; just a bunch of “death by a thousand paper cuts” small things. I have never found VS Code all that easy to configure relative to the alternatives. If I want a heavily customized editor, I’ll go with Emacs, since you get all of Emacs Lisp “out of the box”. If I want something that does the job and nothing else, I’m going with Geany.
You should not interpret this as me having tried VS Code for 10 minutes and then never opening it again. In the unfortunate cases that I’m using Windows, I always use VS Code for programming and text editing. I’ve used it enough to know that there’s nothing special about it. I think most of the crowd that likes VS Code so much is using it on Windows, and they’re doing something targeted by Microsoft (like Typescript). You’re going to be installing extensions in VS Code if you’re writing D, while as I said above, you’ll have a good OOB experience with Geany.
TLDR; It matters what you’re doing. There’s nothing magical about VS Code that makes it dominate the competition. VS Code will work better for some, and it will be an inferior experience for others.