What are people using instead of VS Code?
I relatively recently reinstalled my OS (distro-hopping to Fedora KDE) and as I was installing my various everyday programs, I began to wonder whether there were any solid competitors to VSCode in the space other than IntelliJ products (which I strongly dislike compared to VSCode already). I've used VSCode for a while, but I've definitely noticed my experience with the app getting a little bloated and overwhelmed. But I'm not keeping my finger on the pulse of new IDEs, so I don't know if there's anything new (or at least a solid alternative of some sort) out there that people are switching to.
I'm on Linux, so nothing Mac-exclusive. I know VSCode's extension library is probably hard to match given its popularity, but I'd hope for an alternative that at least has potential to have extensions to cover lesser-known languages and file formats for me. I liked the look and feel of VS Code when I switched to it years ago, so I'm all for apps with similar vibes, but I'd like something that feels faster and more focused.
Please don't recommend vim. I've already heard of vim, and if I wanted to switch to it I would have already.
There’s Zed which sounds like what you’re looking for.
In the terminal there are other options than Vim/Neovim, such as Helix or Ki, but it sounds like you’re looking for something more graphical.
Neovim, Emacs, Sublime (paid but has an eternal trial period that pops up to remind you to pay now and again) and VSCodium (an open source version of VSCode that removes a lot of bloat and telemetry from VSCode) are the usual suspects that I see mentioned. Helix is a newer one that I appreciate.
Honestly though, I don’t do much coding these days, so I scrape by with micro editor in my terminal. I think I’d probably either learn Helix better or settle on some configuration of Neovim and use that if I ever got the notion to do something more robust than tinker with custom tools and scripts for my own personal use.
Be aware that with VSCodium that any of the Microsoft extensions will not work. It took me a few minutes to realize that they were gatekeeping the C/C++ extensions.
Yes, they are in the "extend" phase with their "open source" project.
Previous discussion can be found here.
For what it's worth, I settled on Zed. It fits my needs, runs native, and is only a little unstable. I hope the stability improves as it matures.
I made the switch to Helix after VSCode started pushing way too much Copilot/AI on me.
I was looking at various (neo)vim distributions but they all seemed a bit too janky and painful to use to me. Helix has slightly different motions that actually work for me better, and has sane enough defaults, all I needed to do was to set up some language servers.
If you don't want a terminal based editor, I hear mostly good things about Sublime Text, there's also an attempt to revive and continue Atom, called Pulsar which could be interesting.
I'm mostly (hobby) programming in Zig, and also recently decided to move away from VsCode. I'm still checking stuff out, but currently I'm using Kitty as terminal with Flow Control as editor, nnd as debugger, and I just started to checkout lazygit, which looks good, but I'm not sure I'll need it for my very simple git use.