I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
I use Vim, more specifically Neovim with the LazyVim setup. It turns it into a full fledged IDE basically, with LSPs, hotkeys and everything setup. I started a few years ago with original Vim without plugins. I have 2 problems with my current setup: a) I don’t understand the complete setup and don’t know Lua enough, and b) LazyVim actually updates ton and sometimes things break.
And last time it broke something with my Rust setup, I could not find a solution quickly, but was working on a Rust project. So I installed VSCode the first time, but the Open Source version just called Code in the Linux repositories. But because it is Open Source, it does not come with the VSCode addon repository from Microsoft. I didn’t want do that, so I went back to solving the issue with my Neovim setup. Shortly after I found the solution and worked on my (little) project.
All in all, if you just want an out of the box experience without too much tinkering or problem solving, I wouldn’t recommend the Vim route. There is lot of stuff you have to setup, or at least change settings and understand how to do this. I assume the VSCode version from Microsoft has a better out of the box experience, from the just works perspective.