[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.