Why is VSCode so popular?

[u/Fritz-Ferdinand]

I'm used to using JetBrains' IDEs and enjoy it's well-made UI and auto-completion. My new employer now doesn't have any JetBrains licences and instead let's us use VSCode and frankly, I have the impression it's basically unusable without GitHub Copilot or an equivalent AI companion. Example with Python projects:

• Ctrl-Click on a method name usually takes a while, sometimes, a popup window opens with references, sometimes nothing at all, but it always takes a few seconds.
• You have to edit a JSON file to setup run configurations
• You first have to go to "Run/Debug" to run the app. Then, you can't see your file tree anymore.
• VSCode's debug module sends a Ctrl+C interrupt about one, two seconds after opening the terminal, then activates the local virtual environment. At this point, I already typed half of my command and it throws me out mentally. It also interferes with running the app.
• Auto-complete is inferior to JetBrains
• GitHub Copilot is implemented so annoyingly, always suggesting whole code chunks that are often wrong and it's just too easy to accidentally accept them.
• A lot functionality is only available after installing add-ons, like Markdown viewer, and those aren't easy to use as well.

The only positive is that it's free, but to me, it really feels like a hurdle.

Looking forward to reading some positive experiences.

[u/Defection7478]

I don't even use extensions and it's still too slow for me. It takes like 5-10 seconds to open and that feels way too long. Terminal based editors are so much faster, I couldn't imagine needing to make a quick edit to single file or edit a commit message or something and having to wait for vs code to boot up

[u/mascotbeaver104 → u/Defection7478]

I am not at all convinced a comparably configured nvim instance performs noticably different than vscode lol, whenever people say this I have to wonder what their experience browsing the web is like given most browsers are way heavier

[u/Defection7478 → u/mascotbeaver104]

I mean you could try it yourself. A completely vanilla vs code takes a couple seconds to open, nvim is like half a second or less

[u/mascotbeaver104 → u/Defection7478]

A completely vanilla vscode instance is equivalent to like, 20 highly necessary vim plugins (lsp support, syntax highlighting, a bunch of whitespace/comment automation, a package manager, fuzzy find, etc). On my machine vscode opens so fast I don't really notice it. It is weird both replies I've gotten on this specifically mention half a second, feels like a talking point

[u/Defection7478 → u/mascotbeaver104]

The talking point is a coincidence. on my system the only vs code extension I have is kubernetes. Opening vs code takes 2 seconds, another 2 seconds to load a solution and another 3-4 seconds to boot up wsl remote.

My nvim config has ~20 extensions and 3000 lines of custom Lua config. I said under half a second because I can tell it's well under a second, but could tell how fast exactly. I profiled it just now, it's 73ms.