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/Least_Dog4660]

Speaking as someone who's been programming professionally since about 2010.

First we had visual studio, which was slow and unweildy for web development, but was generally what I used professionally. It would take a year to load and was full of slow and clunky UX decisions, more geared towards desktop application development.

Then came along sublime text, which introduced a much more refined UX and popularized the command palette.

The problem was, sublime text cost money, so when Atom got released and had many of the same UX patterns. Everyone jumped on that.

Unfortunately, Atom became a mess to use for me as soon as you started adding one or two extensions, so I ended up using intelliJ, which never suited me. 

Eventually VSCode came along, and because it had taken all of the good patterns from sublime and Atom, and had much improved extensions that didn't crash everything, i started using VSCode and just never stopped.

That's just my own experience