I recently bought a new dev machine (after much deliberation, I went with a refurbished 2016 MacBook Pro). This was a great opportunity to reconsider the applications I use for my software development. I had been writing code in Atom on my old computer, and I was happy enough with it to not bother switching... for the most part.

I like the idea behind Atom, that it's super customizable with widely-known web technologies to ensure it's on the cutting edge in terms of packages written for it and fast adoption of new technologies. But it was slow, and not all that advanced in any special way. I was open to change.

I dip around between technologies in, mostly, the web development space, and I did not want a full-on IDE. There are a few options for basic code editors out there, and the idea of moving to something like Vim never really appealed to me. Atom and VS Code both lose badly in performance to Sublime.

So why did I go with VS Code?

People fucking love it. Between features, performance, use cases, etc. you can make a case for any editor, and I can't take two months to immerse myself in each one. I took the community for insights. In this thread from a few months ago "Which editor do you use and why?", the verdict was clear to me. Nobody raved about any editor like they did about VS Code. I read through most of the whole thread and the positive feelings towards this editor stood out above the rest.

Here are a couple examples.

People have different reasons for liking different editors, but people love this editor. It has now been a few days for me and I can see why people like it. The git integration is very convenient, and it seems well-designed overall. I'm not one to really fanboy over any piece of technology, but in my entire time using Atom, I never really felt like I was using an editor that was giving me all that much.

I still can't make a strong argument for any editor over another with regards to features and metrics, but the passion for this editor stood out and that was enough for me to buy in. In order to feel good about the choice, one also has to be confident not only in the present product in the direction of the project. I like what Microsoft is doing these days and I trust them to support and lean into VS Code and I am happy with the switch. Ultimately the editor only matters so much as it gets out of the way and lets you write software, but I'm happy with my current situation.

Update: Still using VSCode, and now everyone else is it seems.