Full VS is a lot lighter than it used to be. There is a preview of 15 (confusingly, the next version after 2015) available now.
"Visual Studio “15” Preview 3 (which is different from Visual Studio 2015 Update 3)" - naming is hard.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/07/07/vis...
Why not vim itself? We tried it. They are more used to GUI centric editors. (shrugs)
Last time I checked, there's no official Python support. There are some unofficial plugins, but none of them have true Intellisense support for Python. (e.g. a la Pycharm, or even Visual Studio Tools for Python).
I know they mentioned they were working in it a few months ago on a HN thread, but I haven't heard anything about it since.
Lots of usage out of the top extension. Not quite to PyCharm level, but getting there.
Of course their goal is conformity, easier management (e.g. everybody gets the same linters, code formatters, etc), but the above is a nice side benefit too.
There are tons of people using some antiquated editor and swearing by it, that get amazed when they are forced (by a job) to use a modern IDE and see what it can do for them.
And I'm not talking about Emacs etc -- which can do a lot if you set it up right, I talk about people coding e.g. Java with Slickedit or whatever. Heck even Vim users are sometimes surprised of the convenience (and turn-key use) of embedded debugger, build system, actual AST-based auto-completion, refactoring tools, etc.
Because when we code, actually editing text is the least of our worries, and yet this is what most simple "programming editors" focus on -- it's not like we're building huge ASCII art paintings...
Edit: it looks like an issue about tasks.json presents some good examples: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/981
Edit2: and here's the information about variables: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/tasks#_variable-su...
I enjoy the fact that it gives an integrated experience and allows community extensions. This is a big change from atom where everything must be cobbled together, hope that it works and will break. My hope is that the MS team will pitch in on the most popular extensions per language and take them to the next level as well.
To top it off, it's one of the most open development processes I've ever seen. They have a clearly defined roadmap, release schedule and even tell you exactly how they work in the wiki (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki). It's fantastic to see such a large company open up like this.