I'd credit Sublime Text with that.

I second that, Sublime raised the bar and set the new standard, the only advantage VScode now has over sublime is it's open source license.

... and the fact that I don't have to pay for it. Never understoord why anyone would spend money on a text editor.

It's a tool most of us use for many thousands of hours a year. Buying a better one, even if it was only a bit easier to use, or a bit faster, makes a lot of sense.

Also, many developers (not all) make a lot of money. Even Sublime's steep 60 bucks, which when I discovered Sublime as a student was crazy to me, is reasonable when compared to our salaries.

I don't think anyone would be surprised if a woodworker said "Yeah my drill works fine but I'm going to spend 60 bucks on a slighly better one; I use it a lot and mine's ergonomics aren't great."

Or the vast amount of plugins and community support. Using atom over vscode hasn’t really made sense for a few years now , and I loved atom

VS Code is not really open source.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4288/is-micro...

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_why-does-...

Though you can just use Codium or the OSS version if you don't need remote magic.

TextMate might have a word here.

Yes.

Few of my friends were using Macs and used TextMate. That was years before Sublime was even released.

To me it Sublime was a fast, but clunky alternative to TextMate that ran on PC.

Then came Atom, Brackets, and finally VSCode.