If you spend your entire day in a huge project with a ton of code and work together with a large team of software developers, you'll probably use an IDE. Your workflow probably involves launching the IDE once per day or even leaving it open all the time.

If you do mostly consulting work, small projects, switching between languages with poor IDE support (usually dynamic languages), you'll probably use a smart editor. You'll launch that editor multiple times per day, close it, reopen it, etc.

We should talk more about workflows, there are a ton of them and they're very different in my experience.

It seems like the only distinction between an "IDE" and a "Text Editor" nowadays is that an "IDE" is slow to start up but a "Text Editor" is fast to start up.

Everything else that would be in an IDE historically (project browsers, intellisense, code completion, refactoring, integrated build and debugger UI, test runners, etc, etc) all show up in "Text Editors". The only question is how good that functionality is, which varies between editor-language pairs.

In my mind the biggest difference is that in an IDE I need a stateful "project" or "solution" and with a text editor I don't.

Visual Studio is very much an IDE, but it is perfectly capable of editing a single file too. I think the only reason people tend to use something else for single files is because it tends to be slow to start up.

I personally use VSCode as a text editor in the sense that you describe. I edit my notes in VSCode with Foam, a similar tool to Roam Research. Similarly my blog is based on Jekyll and Markdown files so I use VSCode to edit those markdown files when writing posts. There are definitely cases where I use VSCode as an IDE for other projects but it works well as a simple text editor too IMO.