Microsoft Visual Studio Code vs. Vim

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, an open source text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
$0
Vim
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Vim is an open source configurable text editor.N/A
Pricing
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeVim
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeVim
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeVim
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
As I explained above, definitely switch to VSCode unless you are heavily invested/comfortable with the alternatives, in which case it may not be worth it for now. Vim users may differ, but did I mention VSCode also has a highly integrated and mature Vim plugin? I used to be a Vi…
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Overall, compared to all other open source text editors like Sublime Text, Vim, etc, I've noticed that the Visual Studio Code has been updated regularly which makes it work more efficiently and resolves any bugs on a continuous basis. I feel like VS Code has the speed like Subli…
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
I have been using Vim as both editor and IDE for development projects for a long time until I met Visual Studio Code.
VS Code can provide the editing power of Vim through a plugin, plus many other benefits, thus it can easily replace Vim in most development use.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
When you start using [Microsoft Visual Studio Code], it lands more on the "text editor" side of the spectrum, akin to Vim/Emacs/Sublime. Aligned with this, it's fast and easy to install and setup, and competes with the best of them as a great general purpose tool. But then it …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
As mentioned before, IDE's can be excellent with one thing, and the company we do a lot of things, so it's kind of annoying to have multiple programs, heavy ones to open your work, so just use one, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, personalize thanks to extensions, and you are …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code provides more flexibility and supports easy integration to different platforms (including cloud). It is more modular and lighter application as compared to other integrated development environments. Microsoft Visual Studio Code is easy to learn and …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Sublime Text is strictly a text editor and it is the most robust around in my opinion. It is better than Microsoft Visual Studio Code in this respect, but VS Code has other tools that make using it more streamlined. Brackets has a bit of the weakness of VS Code and Sublime …
Vim
Chose Vim
Notepad++, while being a great editor, is very easy to get familiar with. However, being a serious developer, having the most efficient tool is much more important than having an easy tool. Vim’s speed is very much faster than that of notepad++. Moreover, the amount of plugins …
Chose Vim
I prefer Vim simply because it's as simple as apps like Notepad, Notepad++, or gedit, but as feature rich as Microsoft Visual Studio. The startup time is quick, the response time is quick, it never freezes. Vim always "just works." Vim can be downloaded in a few seconds (if …
Chose Vim
It is hard to compare Vim to many other packages in the developer's stack of tools. It mainly does one thing, edit text, and does it better than anything else. For instance, you can't really compare it to Visual Studio Code because VS actually has a Vim plug-in so you can …
Chose Vim
Vim is a text editor that strives for simplicity. It does that well, but when you need something at the next level, take a look at the above two. Visual Studio Code is a fantastic, free code editor that makes most of my workflow easy.
Best Alternatives
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeVim
Small Businesses
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 9.9 out of 10
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Vim
Vim
Score 9.3 out of 10
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Vim
Vim
Score 9.3 out of 10
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeVim
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(91 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(8 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(23 ratings)
6.0
(5 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Visual Studio CodeVim
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
For low-end devices, it is a very good tool, but for devices that have decent RAM and decent CPU, I would recommend Android Studio for Android dev as it has more features, and for others, I will recommend agile IDEs like Cursor and Anti-Gravity, as they offer higher limits on AI models, and autocomplete is unlimited as well.
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Open Source
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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Pros
Microsoft
  • 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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Open Source
  • 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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Cons
Microsoft
  • 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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Open Source
  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
It is great for non-mainstream Apple device programming (anything not using Swift or Obj-C). However, it is not as full (some would say overly) featured as Xcode, so sometimes you are looking for a feature that it just doesn't have. The ability to add functionality via plugins is a benefit, but the NEED to add features that way is a drawback. Still in all, a solid "almost" IDE.
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Open Source
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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Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Performance
Microsoft
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
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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Open Source
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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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
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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Open Source
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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Scalability
Microsoft
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • 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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Open Source
  • 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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ScreenShots