The Reasons why you Must Use Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a very popular coding editor used by millions of developers around the world.

If you are a Web Developer, you probably use Visual Studio Code for coding your projects.

Its popularity is due to the growth of the web development field in these years and the need of the developers of having a lightweight well-done editor, with few features but less complex than the others available on the market.

It’s also free and it’s developed and maintained by Microsoft with a modern approach using Electron.

These are some characteristics that bring VSCode to the top of the coding editors but there are also others that I want to talk with you in this article.

1. Open-source

The fact that the VS Code is mostly open-source is an unprecedented advantage.

Not only does it mean that the software is free to use, but also that you can help to improve it

Going open-source is a great choice if you want to increase the community engagement.

While not all VS Code users contribute to its codebase, they get a certain feeling of unity.

Other code editors such as Atom and even whole IDEs like Eclipse or NetBeans are also open-source.

2. Simplicity

From the first steps to installing new extensions, everything in VS Code feels simple and intuitive.

With that said, I don’t imply that the VS Code is lacking in any way in terms of features, not at all.

Thanks to its extendable architecture (which we’ll talk about in a moment), VS Code, even when being just a code editor, can be a valuable alternative to other more complex IDEs.

But, unlike those IDEs, it still manages to do it in a compact, user-friendly way.

This simplicity also shows through the VS Code performance, which is surprisingly good, especially for an Electron app.

3. Familiarity

VS Code is built using Electron — a framework for creating desktop apps with JavaScript with the help of Chromium and Node.js.

Many web developers using VS Code are aware of and appreciate this fact but not all do, mainly because of Electron apps notorious high memory usage and low performance.

On the other hand, VS Code utilizes its impressive TypeScript integration to power autocompletion and other useful editing features for both JS and TS.

If you’re using TypeScript, it could be said that VS Code is your best bet.

So, the fact that VS Code is built on top of web technologies and also provides great support for them, makes it feel familiar and pretty much the default choice for a large portion of its growing user-base, web developers.

4. Minimal Design

Design is usually a very subjective thing, but the future is minimal and VSCode decided to embrace the principles of this design approach.

The UI of the VS Code is clean and well-designed

If you don’t like so much the basic design proposed by default, you can create your own customized themes with a high flexibility that lets you customize nearly all UI elements of the editor.

If you don’t have the time to create one by yourself, you can choose a theme from the thousands available on the market, many of them are very nice.

The only rival to VS Code in this regard is probably Atom, although it falls short in a few other areas.

5. Extensions

There are literally thousands of extensions in the VS Code marketplace with new ones coming seemingly every single day!

Extensions can serve many purposes.

From extension-like UI themes to programming language support, debugging, Git integration, and even Spotify players!

You can easily make your own with the help of some JavaScript/TypeScript and detailed docs.

Extensions are very important because they make the VS Code what it currently is, a very capable piece of software.

Without them, VS Code would be not much beyond glorified text editor with good design and basic autocompletion here and there.

Extensions are really important to customizing your software to suit your personal needs.

Conclusion

So, these are the reasons why VSCode is an awesome code editor that you should not ignore.

We saw many aspects, from the writing feels to the features that it offers, and we can notice that it has some valid points in all the fields.

To be clear, I’m not saying that’s not without its flaws or that all the other alternatives on the market are trash, VS Code is certainly not perfect, and there are many capable alternatives to it that you might be interested in.

Thanks for reading,keep learning and happy coding!