[vbezhenar]

There's a spectrum. notepad.exe, vi, emacs/vim/notepad++, vscode, idea. Every new layer adds more features and adds more bloat. You can upgrade to the next layer by installing enough extensions (if editor allows it and those extensions exist). You can certainly turn your bare vim into vscode comparable editor with enough extensions. And you can certainly install enough extensions into vscode to make it comparable with idea.

An important thing is to find a personal sweet spot. For me, using Idea with hundred plugins is just not worth it. Spring plugin comes with thousands of features, but when I disable it, miss very few things, and the bloat is real: slow start, lots of new menu items and icons, new bugs.

I, personally, prefer to use editor on steroids like vscode, with full language-aware support. At the same time I'm using external terminal a lot, doing builds and stuff there. So IDE for me is an entire computer and vscode is part of this IDE.

[tsimionescu]

> notepad.exe, vi, emacs/vim/notepad++, vscode, idea

You forgot the natural root of this hierarchy: ed, the standard text editor.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

[The_Colonel]

> And you can certainly install enough extensions into vscode to make it comparable with idea.

No, you can't. Comparable plugins don't exist.

[bitzun]

Also the quality of vscode is strictly worse. I tried it a few years ago and syntax highlighting a basic python program using stock vscode would get stuck (highlighting the wrong characters in random colors) in nondeterministic ways. I tried it again recently and I still see syntax highlighting bugs. Vim does a better job.