Once I learned how to use vs code productively it really changed my mind. The other day I needed to do a quick base64 encode and vs code had that. Same goes for formatting some json or doing a diff. It's all available in a single tool with no learning curve. Hell it even has git and git blame in there.

I think VS Code is just extremely convenient and can address most peoples needs out of the box. It’s therefore also very beginner friendly. You don’t need to constantly fight the tool or spend hours researching how to configure some trivial feature. That being said VS Code is quite heavy and has an enormous amount of GUI elements. I mean they even have buttons for things like git fetch and pull for heavens sake. They could release a VSC Light that strips most of the GUI out.

True, but you can customise it a lot. So the number of UI elements is not a problem.

Vs Code is the gateway drug of real IDE's. Last time I checked, it still cant do things like navigate to definition, or rename a calss along with all mentions of it in comments. Or count TODO: comments

navigate to definition -> f12

rename all instances of class/method/variable -> f2

count TODOs: too many vs code plugins that will do that for you

Not sure when the last time you checked, but vs code is a practical full fledged IDE with the right plugins.

I don't think this is accurate - at least not anymore. VS Code supports LSP configuration which means all those features should be available.

That said - I haven't used it in years. Way too heavy and Vim does all of those + modal editing.

Yeah - to each their own. I have all these tools in my terminal too. I'm just a lot faster in the terminal, and I don't really think it's possible to be faster in a GUI (even if there are shortcuts - there will surely be shortcomings before you eventually just re-invent a terminal via VSCode).

Plus - modal editing :)