Out of interest, what in your opinion was so bad about VS that you wanted to get rid of it?

First of all I should probably say that I'm quite new in the .Net world, and that many of my issues with VS could probably be alleviated. I just don't know how.

Mostly I think it's just about preference. I like my editor lean [insert joke about emacs being bloated here], visually non-distracting and customizable. I also try to avoid using my mouse. Emacs is all of these things for me, VS is not.

VS can definitely be configured to be lean. My setup is dark, almost no chrome, and is fully keyboard driven. It can take a bit of work though. VS isn't my main editor, but I enjoy it when I use it, after a few years of wrestling with settings!

I agree, recent versions are preety customisable. I hardly use the mouse and I didn't have to do much to make VS comfortable to use.

For me, it's bloat. VS is slow as molasses and has a thousand features I don't need nor want. I also miss the multiselect feature from Sublime.

If you want multiselect in Visual Studio, it's available via several extensions:

https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/2beb9705-b568... http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SimultaneousEditingForVisualSt... https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f301cf82-e80b...

I think I'd rather go for VS.code then, than try to bend Emacs or Sublime into doing C#.

For what it's worth, VS.code uses omnisharp-roslyn for its C# integration. So you can get a very similar experience from editors which have omnisharp-roslyn support.

But VS code has project support and debugging integration AFAIK.

That's the kind of things that really set IDE vs editor in terms of usability.

Interesting, apart from longish compile times on big projects I've never had speed issues. Installing Resharper, useful as it is, made it crawl so I abandonded it, but I feel productive in VS on its own.

Would makefiles not cut it for your needs?

Probably, I just don't know enough about MSBuild to write any yet.