Anyone who knows me knows well that I am not a huge Microsoft fan. I’ve been a Unix user for over 20 years, I’ve been using Linux for nearly as long, and my current laptop is a Mac. I prefer Google Docs to Microsoft office, I never run Internet Explorer (Or Edge), I don’t like IIS, and I would never run SQL Server. So, it comes as a shock to most of my tech friends that I am a huge fan of Visual Studio Code. In fact, I would have to say that it’s probably one of the best general purpose development environments ever created. What makes it so great that I, a Unix user would endorse it? I think there are two main factors that made me fall in love with Visual Studio Code. First, it’s cross platform – Visual Studio Code runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is a big deal for me. I prefer tools that I can run on a variety of platforms. While I typically work on a Mac, I do have a Windows machine too. Having an environment that runs on both means that I can easily transition from one machine to another without having to adopt different tools. Second, and probably even more important, is the wide variety of plugins available. Whether you need to create or edit HTML, C# .NET applications, JavaScript, Python, XML, there’s a plugin available for you. There are also plugins for Docker, git, and a REST client. Furthermore, the IDE is pretty simple and easy to work with. Where I used to use text editors such as UltraEdit or TextWrangler, I have now come to rely on Visual Studio Code as my default choice for editing code when I don’t have a more specific IDE installed. Kudos to Microsoft for a creating such an amazing cross-platform code editor!
