I spend all day navigating and reasoning about the codebase I'm working in, so I need strong tools that aide me in that. That's where VSCode doesn't hold a candle to Rider IME. So Rider is my daily driver at work.
The responses from some devs leave me wondering what their env/projects/work day actually look like and how does their tooling actually work for them in practice.
It would be incredibly interesting to see the landscape of different work envs and tooling and do a comparison of what happens in each given env when you swap out the tooling.
A typical work day has me working in at least two different projects. Visual Studio/Rider is so heavy that I don't want to keep two instances of it running all the time and it's so slow that switching between projects in a single instance carries a heavy context switching cost. I also have a set of markdown files that I use as a second brain which I like to open periodically to check notes or jot down ideas.
> Do you work on multiple things that don't require coding?
I also write documentation, answer emails, review PRs, occasionally modify art assets, maintain team documents, etc. I don't always want Visual Studio/Rider hogging all of my memory or chewing up the CPU.
> Why does launch-time matter at all?
I hope what I already wrote made it clear but TL;DR I jump between projects, don't want multiple instances consuming all my resources, and (bonus) I frequently need to restart Visual Studio because it can get in to a weird state when working in C#/F# hybrid projects.
What IDEs have going for them is that the features are generally constructed by people who know what they are doing and test them at the same time. Whereas a plugin could be written by anyone. Also there's a great "works on my machine" when it comes to performance: the plugin author will just test the plugin on its own rather than with a bunch of other plugins, so their performance target is artificially low.