[raincole]

> It’s incredible to me how many people choose VS Code because of its aesthetics

No. VS code is popular because it's

1. Free and open source

2. Come with a lot of official extension [1]

3. Backed by MS which has the incentive to commondize code editors

It's quite similar to Chrome.

[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Microsoft

[RadiozRadioz]

Technically it's not Free (libre) or Open Source. The "VSCode" that people use is a proprietary telemetry-laiden application that cannot be reproducibly built from available source. You're probably wanting: https://vscodium.com/

[da39a3ee]

Telemetry is orthogonal to the concepts of Free/Open source. You sound like someone who just has an ideological objection to companies making money and producing text editors, and to proprietary software. However, many of the people here on HN work on proprietary software.

[wokwokwok]

Jetbrains has plenty of extensions (1st party, high quality plugins that are far better than some of the 1st party Microsoft plugins) and no one cares if it's by Microsoft (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?).

Honestly, I doubt most people even care it's kind-of open source (1).

> 1. Free

This is the reason most people use vscode.

That's it.

It's free, and it's pretty good.

It's not better. It's just free.

Nothing wrong with liking free stuff; free stuff is great; but don't confuse 'it didn't cost me anything' with 'it's good'.

There's a difference between value (ie. for what you paid, you got something that was worth significantly more than you paid, which in this case is zero) and quality (independent of cost, the thing is just plain old good).

vscode may be more valuable to people than jetbrains products, but it isn't a higher quality product.

There's a massive difference between those two things.

[1] - It's not open source 'technically'. https://ruky.me/2022/06/11/im-switching-form-vs-code-to-vs-c...

[raincole]

> Honestly, I doubt most people even care it's kind-of open source (1).

Average users might not care. But extension authors do. Yes, of course you can write extensions for close source projects, but it'd take longer to do "hacky" things since you'll need to read decompiled code / memory stack to understand its internals. I remember a very popular extension used a private field (and later broke because VSCode changed its internal implementation).

I personally constantly check Blender's source code here and there during the development for our internal Python tools, so I suppose people who write VSCode extension sometimes do.

> (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?).

It means VScode benefits MS indirectly and they can keep it free indefinitely while being a for-profit company.

[mike_hearn]

Note that IntelliJ Platform itself is open source.

[johnnyanmac]

>Nothing wrong with liking free stuff; free stuff is great; but don't confuse 'it didn't cost me anything' with 'it's good'.

I paid for Sublime Text 3 back in the day and still pay for Rider. I prefer VS Code to Sublime Text 3 as it's more extensible for the kinds of environments I work in, and has some decent built-in amenities like version control and debuggers.

It's not better than Rider objectively (and it's not better by design. MSFT doesn't want to cannabalize Visual Studio), but for smaller scripting and editing it runs circles around Rider. I prefer using it when I know I'm not going to be coding something complex nor for hours on end. A great complimentary tool to have on end.

But if you have a "good" alternative as this lightweight c#/c++ editor, let me know. Someone recommended Zed but that is Mac only.

[dist-epoch]

There's also a free edition of Intellij - Community Edition. Why don't people use that?

[simon_void]

I did for years and it was perfectly fine. But then I got hooked on the additional Spring configuration support that comes with the Ultimate edition But yes, IntelliJ Community edition feels very complete for a lot of programming tasks (my experience is mostly Java/Kotlin projects with a bit of web frontend & Rust on the side). It comes with debugging but not with a profiler (which I still haven't used ) So try the community edition and see if you miss anything! Chances are you won't.

[rob74]

There's something to be said for a "pre-packaged" IDE where you don't have to first install the "bare-bones" IDE and then find and install various plugins (of which there may be several with overlapping functionality, where you have to first find out which one works better for you, where you never know if there might be conflicts etc. etc.). Turns out there are even people willing to pay money for something that works "out of the box", like the JetBrains IDEs.

And VS Code is not only similar to Chrome, it is Chrome pretending to be an IDE, and that always leaves a nagging feeling of inefficiency in the back of my mind. The JetBrains IDEs, being Java-based (although they hide it really really well, installing their own OpenJDK-based runtime automatically), are also resource intensive, but still better than Electron...

[johnnyanmac]

IDEs in general tend to be resource intensive. Not necessarily because they need all those resources, but that cost of tech bloat was probably necessarily in order to let them ship to begin with. It's why back many programmers kept a text editor for smaller scripting or quick editing and only whipped up Eclipse/VS/IntelliJ when absolutely needed (ignoring the vim/emacs wizards who have dozens of plugins and get the best o both worlds).

VS Code is nice in that it strikes a good balance between a Text Editor and full blown IDE. Far from replacing the latter, but I can and have worked on medium sized projects exclusively in VS Code.

[p0w3n3d]

I tried to develop some C in VSCode and failed. The configuration of the build process is far from straightforward. There is no possibility to run without debug, etc.

[tirpen]

Yes that too of course.

But I have personally heard people more than one person completely dismiss JetBrain's IDEs because they didn't like how they looked.