There are a couple things others touch on, but to expand on a few things:
1. Microsoft was formed for developers in the first place. It's first product was BASIC (for MOS 6502). Developer productivity has always been a part of Microsoft's long term vision of itself. It is entirely possible for VSCode to be developed solely to give developers warm fuzzies and for that to fit Microsoft's long term vision.
2. VSCode gently encourages you to explore other Microsoft tools and services. It's built in Typescript and makes cross-platform .NET a reality and has some useful Azure integration extensions to help you run things on Azure services. Part of the delight to VSCode is that it doesn't hard sell any of those: it offers them as opt-in tools and lets you explore them yourself. (Opinion: This is a wonderful sort of return to confidence from Microsoft that their developer tools nearly sell themselves on their own merits, Microsoft doesn't need to hard sell them.)
3. VSCode is "made out of Azure". Part of why VSCode has seemed so effortless to build was that a lot of the core pieces (particularly the Monaco code editor at the heart of VSCode was built for Azure, then reused by IE/Edge Dev Tools, VSTS, before being brought into its own in VSCode) were built for Azure itself to provide a nice development/devops environment experience in the cloud. That seems a pretty good advertisement for something like Azure when even the systems built to support the services offered are strong development tools of their own merit.
e.g. if VS Code and the idea of MS supporting OSS was around 5 years ago, perhaps Windows phone might have had enough apps and been successful.
I stopped using VisualStudio in favor of Code in regards of .NET Core development.
It's mostly not liking Electron-based, performance is very reasonable for VSCode, I think.
As for the end-game: it's most likely luring you into Azure. Tight integration with a proper editor/IDE might give it an edge over competitors.
I mostly leave the editor permanently open on the project I'm working on, so I guess I don't really notice it much either way. And using the integrated terminal to change one dir back and switch to another project, then opening it with code . is a pretty good flow so I don't feel stifled in that sense either.
I leave Visual Studio permanently open, but I use sublime for quick edits/viewing/changes (e.g. opening a remote file on perforce, or modifying a config file), so even 2 seconds to interactivity is just too long.
Even still 2 seconds is too long for quick edits.
IntelliJ is probably the most annoying...it takes less time than VS does, but during the 2 minutes it takes to start it hijacks the OS window focus at least 5 times. I like to actually work on other things while waiting for that beast to start up and it constantly screws everything up.
It’s noticeable but is it really that much of an issue?
Damn, I love me them multiple cursors.
Define large too - several mb? Or several 100?
Maybe you’re just an outlier?
Still get syntax highlighting and everything, but waiting for VS Code can be long enough to derail my train of thought.
Also, IDEA has scratch files for quick notes available through a shortcut (I guess VS Code might have a similar plugin), so startup tome isn’t an issue either.
Still use it exclusively as my C++ IDE with the help of clangd. Would love a native easy to use editor with good support for LSP and vscode's debug protocol. Bonus points if it works in the command line.
Given that the development is very-very cheap for Microsoft, even this single thing could make worthwhile for MS to continue the project. VS code appears on HN regularly, it connects to a demographic that's very different from MS's core dev audience.
Maybe its better on other platforms, but on linux there's 30ms keyboard input latency in vscode, compared to the avg of 6ms I get in sublime.
The perceived difference in responsiveness is significant.
See https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ if you're curious.
lucky for me it's all unnoticeable.
I am an intermediate JS programmer, fiddled with TypeScript a couple of years ago and was unconvinced. Since then TS has matured a lot, and I have been exposed to it in passing from looking at VSCode extensions. If I were to begin a web project today, I would give TypeScript a try. If it weren't for VSCode my thinking would probably be quite different.
As an open source project, VSCode is a significant example of TypeScript on Electron. As a self-hosted IDE I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode.
You can filter by the "VS Code tracked" label on the TypeScript issues which will give you a rough idea.
https://github.com/microsoft/typescript/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9...
The question I'm wondering about is what is Microsoft's end game with this? I'm comparing this to the history of Google Chrome that, when released, was similar in the sense that it was better than the alternatives: wickedly fast, open sourced, with no apparent strings attached. The business benefits to Google and market control from owning Chrome are obvious today and I'm trying to understand the long term view in VSCode - i.e how to you eventually create business value from a free editor? Premium features? Better integration with Microsoft's services? I wonder if there's a deeper vision - I mean, as opposed to Chrome, VSCode does not know much about me personally, does not provide much data to further leverage Microsoft's services, and targets a much narrower audience to begin with. So, what's the business model behind it's development. I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft...