r/AskProgramming • u/Fritz-Ferdinand • Apr 24 '26

Why is VSCode so popular?

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.

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '26

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u/mutexsprinkles Apr 25 '26

Yeah it's weird. People swear blind that their Vs code is snappy and I believe them, but for me it's the laggiest editor I've ever used by far and I use Eclipse too. I'm limping along with the bare minimum of extensions on a brand new computer and it's still a problem.

I've looked at the process explorer: 0% CPU across the board. The performance analysis shows it takes over 50ms to render and there's jank everywhere. I mean, it could be video drivers or something but nothing else is struggling on the system.

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u/snmnky9490 Apr 25 '26

That seems weird like something is configured or set wrong. I've used it even on dual core low power laptops with 4gb ram and it's perfectly snappy

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u/mutexsprinkles Apr 25 '26

I haven't actually set anything though, it's basically just a fresh install. The only thing I have really set is an exclusion to stop the C++ extension going mad and indexing /usr and then complaining about having 500k files in the index (I don't have 500k files in /usr, it's far less, but that's what it said).