this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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This is why you use Emacs, Kate, Neovim and so on. Never understood how anyone could use a software as confusing as VSCode.
VSCode (well codium actually) actually felt quite nifty until Micro$lop started EEEing it by blocking the app store (there are workarounds for that) and then blocking their C extension from being installed in non-vanilla VSCode (pin it to the previous version).
But all in all, vim with cscope is my bare minimum.
It feels like people are just punching themselves in the face.
Yes, Microsoft has taken over a lot of projects which made coding easy. So either you submit to Microsoft's control or you spend the time to learn to use the alternatives.
Emacs is basically older than computers, stable and has a huge amount of support and plug-ins. Nvim is newer, but vi/vim have existed since before electrons learned to jump bandgaps and has a similarly deep level of community expertise/support.
If you're just starting off, your school is likely deep in Micrsoft's sphere of influence so you probably learned VS Code/Visual Studio. Moving to Emacs or Nvim is much harder than it would be if you had learned them in the first place, but believe me (a random stranger on the Internet wouldn't lie to you!) it is worth the time to learn.
Centralized platforms for multiple uses and a huge tool ecosystem. That is it. It is simply much much much easier to set up and get a consistent experience.
Embedded coding (as an example) has an extremely scattered ecosystem of vendor-run IDE forks which are usually a pretty bad experience.
Their commandline documentation is often complete trash so instead of fixing that, they just make a simple plugin for vscode and they have a cross-compatible IDE that already works with all of their customers' favorite plugins with very little work.
Also, code-server. There is no other IDE that has an experience like that as far as I know.
I understand and agree with you.
Various companies go out of their way to make plugin-ins for the platform that everyone uses and everyone uses the platform because of the additional support that it receives on account of being the most popular.
Microsoft is the one that ultimately benefits by being able to make anti-consumer decisions because each individual decision by Microsoft isn't as bad as the friction required to switch and learn to a new IDE. Microsoft can move the product in any direction that they want as long as they do it in steps tiny enough to not scare people away from their platform.
In the end we're the frogs that they're boiling, eventually you gotta jump out of the pot.