This is supposed to be a minimal, stand-alone dev kit. VS Code is large, wants you to download half the internet, brings in lots of dependences (a browser, a language runtime, graphics libraries etc.).

Git wasn't on the menu because it included perl, which is orders of magnitude smaller than VSCode's dependencies.

So of the somewhat popular crowd, vim seems like a good fit, and the project creator uses it regularly, if I remember his blog correctly.

Not sure what the current equivalent of a small, dependency-free native Windows editor would be. Notepad++ is popular, but has the scintilla engine as a requirement and seems to require Visual Studio for building, not make. Guess the same is true for a lot of other candidates.

SciTE (also based on scintilla) has worked for me as a good, light-weight Notepad replacement.

Vim works offline, VS Code and many of its plugins do not.