Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. Notepad++ vs. Vim

As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.

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well suited for 1) Coding and Development - Writing and editing code, Quick prototyping and testing of code snippets, Debugging and inspecting code using syntax highlighting and line numbering, 2) web development - Creating and editing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other web-related files .Managing and organizing web projects with multiple files and directories. Not suited for - 1) processing huge files 2) graphic designing 3) complex gui designs 3) Data Analysis and Manipulation - Editing and cleaning up text-based data files before importing them into analytical tools. Applying regular expressions to extract, transform, and manipulate data. 4) System Administration and IT - change system configuration file

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I would recommend Vim in any scenario where text files have to be viewed, created, or edited on GNU/Linux computers. Regardless if you need to quickly change a few things in a configuration file, or you need to write up a full document, Vim is great. I wouldn't use Vim to view, edit, or create anything that requires "rich-text". In other words, if you need to format the text (bolding, font colours, word-art, etc), then Vim isn't the tool to use.

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• Integrate with the git repository very well.
• Integrated copilot chat is very helpful to write code snippets and helps beginners to start with coding and development.
• Great library of available extensions is one of the best features in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
• Dedicated Testing option to configure pytest and others are quite handy to use.

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• Notepad++ allows us to keep open files in tabs. Like in a web browser, these tabs let us access these files quickly and easily. Furthermore, even if we forget to save the files when closing the program or shutting down the PC, Notepad++ retains them in the open tabs when we reopen it.
• Notepad++ supports many different file types. We usually save our files created in Notepad as normal text files, but sometimes as JSON, PHP, and HTML files.
• Notepad++ is lightweight and requires little resources. Using it is snappy and responsive.
• The developer of Notepad++ frequently updates the software with bug fixes, performance improvements and new features.

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• The efficient modal editing makes it very fast to write/edit code as I think of it.
• The customization and wide range of plugins let me do very specific things and automate parts of my workflow.
• The fact that it runs inside a terminal simplifies my window management and just becomes another Tmux window in my workflow.

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• The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
• The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
• A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these

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• UI looks a bit dated.
• Sometimes the number of options are overwhelming and require a quick search to figure out where to locate a particular function.
• Some way to do a diff between files would be great. Still need to resort to another paid app for that - unless it is a buried function I don't know about or there's a plugin for it.

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• Without a doubt the hardest program to learn. It is a completely different paradigm of thinking compared to other editors
• By default it doesn't have lots of fancy features you would find in larger IDE programs like code completion and linking
• It lives in the command line so a user has to be comfortable with this interface

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Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.

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I use it every day for 13 years already and it never disappointed me

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Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.

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There are lot of features to talk about. Especially the usability is good. Everyone can easily to use and user-friendly. Can also update easily. Can also write and execute the programming languages like C, C++ etc. Encoding is also the major feature that helps me a lot and converter as well.

I don't consider the steep learning curve to be a hinderance on the overall usability. I would rate this a ten, but to be honest a lot of people do get hung up at the beginning and just abandon it. However, for people who have made the moderate effort to get over the hump, nothing can be more usable.

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Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.

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Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).

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Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.

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I haven't needed to utilize any support related to Notepad++. I guess this is a good thing because I found it to be quite intuitive. There are almost infinite features you can tweak and plugins you can download but I haven't had to do that because Notepad++ is really good right out of the box.

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There is no commercial support for Vim. Thus, it will not get a mark beyond 5. However, community support is very good. You can easily find solutions for most of the problems in the community.

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Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.

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Notepad for Windows, Microsoft Word...LibreOffice Writer....I have used all of these for code writing and editing. Once again I like the universal feel of Notepad++. Basic Notepad, is just that, basic...and kind of clunky for what it is. This is a cool that I have installed on all my computers and also keep it on a thumb drive if I need it elsewhere.

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Vim's keybindings are a lot more complex than Notepad++. With that, comes a whole bunch of capability that Notepad++ just can't match. Emacs is comparable, in terms of capabilities--because Vim is built into so many unix systems, I chose to learn it instead of Emacs. Knowing both probably isn't a bad idea, but there's enough to learn in either camp to keep you busy

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It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.

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• Saves money by replacing suites of tools such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.
• Speeds development time and developer environment setup time
• Strengthens code quality with integrated autoformatting and linting
• Strengths Git practices by keeping version control tightly connected with the code

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• Productivity has increased for developers.
• It's free so instead of buying a piece of software, you can use this to replace many of them that may only specialize in one thing.
• It gives our developers confidence knowing they have such a reliable, free tool at their disposal.

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• It always increases productivity.
• Sometimes feature discovery is not easy. It could be documented well like how to install a plugin and if it supported well or not.

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