Funny how people are so different. I have never once thought that I needed my text editor to look good. Stare at anything long enough and your brain isn't even going to process it anymore!

fwiw I use Linux and suspect that's a big part of why Macs never appealed to me.

While I am a Mac user, I've used Vim a lot, so I don't want to make it sound too much like I demand text editors be visually stunning works of art. :) Code initially looked just kind of clunky and toylike to me, in a way that Atom -- and Mac native editors like TextMate and BBEdit -- didn't. It's a little hard to explain. Code still isn't my favorite editor, but it's probably my favorite cross-platform editor.

For me, it’s the noise and clutter — every time I spin it up, it feels like VS Code is demanding my attention in multiple popups, and there’s a new tab or button I’ve never seen before with some mystical purpose, and the bottom bar is some jarring color that makes me feel like something is broken.

IntelliJ IDEs feel similar — sometimes I’ll open them up and after upgrading several plugins and dismissing a bunch of popups and “what’s new” dialogs, I don’t even remember what I was trying to do in the first place.

A month ago I switched back to Vim, from TextMate, but still on a Mac, and honestly: Vim is kinda pretty. I spend most of my day in fullscreen Vim, and with a good theme, Airline and a pleasing font it’s just as pretty as VSCode if not more.

Maybe I just have horrendous taste, but I just get GitHub Theme Light and am done with it. Do you tend to be nitpicky around aesthetics?

I really don’t think “selecting a color theme” qualifies as being “nitpicky about aesthetics.” But maybe I’m just nitpicky about aesthetics.