Visual Studio Code works with many more languages, loads an order of magnitude quicker, has amazing settings sync and a rich community of plugin developers. And it's free.

If you haven't properly checked it out, you owe it to yourself to do so.

VSCode is my choice for a fresh codebase.

But if I'm shoved into an old codebase and I need to grok it fast, Jetbrains tools are a lifesaver.

Absolutely! I teach a CS class in my university and encourage my students to try them out. (It's a class where students are free to pick the language to use, but they usually end up using C++, C#, or Kotlin.) They seem to love the many suggestions the IDE provides about code style, and the visual clues that suggest how to use some syntax. At the end of the semester, many of them have thanked me for that tip, saying that «I would have never imagined that an IDE could teach me how to write better code!».

Not to mention, there are so many helpers built in and it's one of the few pieces of software that I don't have any major complaints about.

I third this.

I've tried everything from Notepad++ (and plugins), Sublime (and plugins), MacVim (and plugins), Atom, VS Code, to other heavyweight IDEs...

I'm not a lucky person, avoid games of luck, but consider one of my few lucky moments being grandfathered into Jetbrains's sub model at a steep discount.

Me too, my "all tools" subscription has been the single best decision and return of my career

Last week I learned some cool mouse and keyboard shortcuts in JetBrains, only to then discover they also did the same action in Visual Studio! No more “right click-go to definition” for me! I was presently surprised at how polished it was

Do toy have a link?

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x - this plugin shows you existing keyboard shortcuts for every action you make