For me, it has basically nothing to do with being open source. Despite all the constant hate about electron apps, I've consistently found VS Code to be much snappier to use than any time I've tried using Jetbrains IDEs (whether on beefy desktop or slimmer laptop), and that's even after disabling a huge number of plugins and features that I don't want. That's not even talking about the actual features of each; I think I just prefer a smaller initial feature set with a rich, well-supported ecosystem of third-party as well as first-party plugins rather than a huge default feature set (which inevitable comes with a bunch of things I don't want) and third-party plugins being mostly an afterthought.

> Despite all the constant hate about electron apps, I've consistently found VS Code to be much snappier to use than any time I've tried using Jetbrains IDEs (whether on beefy desktop or slimmer laptop), and that's even after disabling a huge number of plugins and features that I don't want.

I use both vscose and intellij, and I must say that even though vscode can sometimes feel snappier without any plugin running, it's missing a whole lot of features even with dedicated Microsoft plugins running, to the point it feels half-baked. I'm talking about things like basic refactoring support and even symbol recognition.

IDEs like intellij and Clion may have slightly longer startup times, but that doesn't really matter as you're only going to start the app a few times throughout the day.

Ultimately vscode is nice if all you want to do is open text files and Run regex searches, but the minute you want to run the most basic refactoring steps then it's faster and less frustrating to just start intellij, refactor, save files, and quit the app.

I think this probably depends at lot on language. I mostly code in Rust, and for a simple example of one of the "most basic refactoring steps", renaming a type/function/variable/etc. and updating all the uses work quite well using rust-analyzer. I'm not doubting that Intellij might have a lot of nice refactoring features that VS Code doesn't, but I'm definitely able to do a lot more than just regex searches.

Just my experience at work (I don't intend to change your mind or invalidate your opinions) I can see from reading code what IDE the developer used, this is because I investigate bugs and I see trivial JS bugs that Intellij highlights but the author used VS Code and an avoidable bug was put in. Intellij is slower because it actually parses your project and dependencies and even with a dynamic language as JS it can infer many types and show you the error.

Same here. Open a JS project in a Jetbrains IDE and things start going red all over the place. Asking the JS devs about it, they're like "oh we didn't us TS on that file" or "oh yeah we know about that, just ignore it". And the best one "oh yeah, that's a bug, we haven't finished that part yet."

Honestly happens with python devs too when you open their project or code in a "real" IDE that checks for all these things.

That's fair! I don't program in dynamically types languages on a regular basis, so it's possible that I'd notice more of a difference if I did.

We hate electron apps because native apps are much faster

But Java/Kotlin is not native. Before electron, we hated Java apps because native apps are much faster

I develop in Pascal and Kotlin. When I had a laptop without SSD, Jetbrains IDE would take almost 30 minutes to start, while the Pascal native IDE could start in 30 seconds.

Yep. Lately, it seems like a lot of people think “native” means “not web technologies”. Way to many people think that Jetbrains apps are native because they are written in Java.

Yeah, I briefly tried using nvim for csharp dev and discovered that even though csharp lsp is open source, the razor lsp integration is not (or was not at the time) and the vscode plugin downloads some proprietary binary.

Or if you care about open source, use VS Codium. It's literally VS Code minus the proprietary crap, and with a different branding.

But the "proprietary crap" part is where they've implemented all of the Python support, among other things, isn't it? And last time I looked the license prohibited using Microsoft's proprietary plugins with VS Codium.

The Python extension is open source but Pylance isn't. Use Pyright (type checking ext which is essentially Pylance without the ML stuff) instead of Pylance.

Instead of Microsoft's C/C++ extension use clangd.

Remote SSH and Remote Containers have alternatives as well but nothing as good.

Google and Red Hat's extensions work out of the box along with several thousand other extensions.

> Instead of Microsoft's C/C++ extension use clangd.

Didn’t know about this one, thanks.

Go on…

It's fine to prefer M$ lock in to other lock in. I just take issue with blaming Jetbrains for lock-in while at the same time praising VScode which also has lock in.

I personally just use emacs.

Go on… what Microsoft lock ins in VSCode are you referencing?

The vast majority of vscode is opensource actually. I'm unaware of any major feature that is not part of their OSS project.

https://vscodium.com/

Isn't LiveShare proprietary and closed source?

Pylance is for sure, but it's built on the open source Pyright they provide, which is still pretty decent.

I think there's other things too but I don't recall the comprehensive list.

OP is referring to some of Microsoft's intellisense language plugins. They are not bundled with VS code by default but they are the best-in-class in terms of language support for autocompletion.

Embrace, extend,...

… Trebuchet?