[criddell]

> How?

Microsoft has done a lot better job promoting VSCode than GNU has promoting Emacs for the past few years. More mindshare among influential developers / evangelists has lead to massive increases in adoption which leads to better extensions which in turn fuels more adoption.

It probably doesn't hurt that VSCode uses the MIT license.

[ithrow]

The vscode remote plugin is developed by microsoft and it's closed source. I can see why, it gives them a competitive advantage over all rival IDEs.