Visual Studio Code by Microsoft

Been using VS Code since 2017. Tried WebStorm, Sublime, Atom, even gave Vim a serious shot. VS Code hits the sweet spot: fast enough, extensible enough, and the IntelliSense for TypeScript/JavaScript is genuinely best-in-class. The fact that it's free and open-source (MIT license) with Microsoft backing means it's not going anywhere.

Extension ecosystem is the killer feature. ESLint, Prettier, GitLens, Docker, Kubernetes, Remote SSH — I have 47 extensions installed and startup is still under 2 seconds. The marketplace search inside the editor is excellent.

Only gripes: Electron overhead (RAM usage with many windows), and the settings JSON UI is confusing for beginners. But `Cmd+Shift+P` → "Open Settings (JSON)" solves that.

The Remote SSH extension alone is worth switching for. I develop on a beefy EC2 instance but edit locally with zero latency. File watching, terminal, debugging, extensions — all run on the remote. My laptop stays cool, battery lasts all day.

Also love Dev Containers. Define your dev environment in `.devcontainer/devcontainer.json`, and anyone on the team gets the exact same setup in one click. No more "works on my machine" for environment issues.

GitHub Copilot integration is smooth. Inline suggestions are hit-or-miss but chat (`Ctrl+I`) is genuinely useful for explaining legacy code or generating tests.

As an individual editor? Excellent. As a team standard? Painful. No centralized extension policy — everyone installs different versions, causing subtle bugs. Extension auto-updates break things randomly. We had a Prettier 3.0 auto-update that reformatted our entire codebase differently overnight.

Workspace recommended extensions help but aren't enforced. No way to lock extension versions org-wide. Settings sync is per-user, not per-team. We built custom tooling to manage this.

Also, the marketplace has malware incidents (malicious extensions with typo-squatted names). Microsoft scans but reactive, not proactive. We block marketplace access and host a private registry.

Used PyCharm for years. Switched when Pylance (Microsoft's Python language server) matured. Type checking, auto-import, go-to-definition, refactoring — all work reliably now. Jupyter notebook integration is excellent: run cells, view outputs, export to HTML/PDF, all inline.

Debugging is solid. Conditional breakpoints, logpoints, debug console with variable inspection. Remote debugging on Kubernetes pods via `debugpy` works out of the box.

Ruff (fast Python linter) extension replaces flake8/black/isort with one tool. 100x faster. VS Code + Ruff + Pylance = best Python DX I've had.

I'm a 15-year Vim user. The VS Code Vim extension (vscodevim) covers 95% of what I need. Relative line numbers, macros, registers, marks, search/replace with regex — all there. Which-key integration shows keybindings on space-pause.

Only missing: some ex commands, custom text objects, and the occasional plugin-specific binding. But I get remapped in `keybindings.json`.

Pro tip: `"vim.useSystemClipboard": true` and `"vim.handleKeys": { "<C-c>": false }` for copy/paste and Ctrl+C in terminal.