What exactly is Visual Studio Code?

Question

Recently I\'ve read about Microsoft Visual Studio Code. I work primarily with C and C++ languages on GNU/Linux. My question is whether Visual Studio Code is just a simple ed

Answer 1

Although it's not mentioned by Microsoft,it appears that vscode is a clone of the ZED ide/text editor. What makes ZED unique is a set of principles designed to "reduce the cognitive load" of developing.

About the only important features I've found which vs code does not share with ZED is the auto-save feature and VIM keyboard bindings. [EDIT: turns out auto-save is supported by off by default.] Nearly everything else it has is copied there. While lacking those important features does reduce vs code's utility, the fact that it works across environments, has minimal window dressing, split panels, user editable configuration and is based on a node.js engine, makes it a very usable cross language editor.

Obviously, if you are an old-school windows/asp.net/.net sort of developer you have no need for something like vs code or zed since you stay in Visual Studio all the time. However, for the enlightened few who are just at home on mac or linux and who use python, node.js, json, c#, typescript etc interchangeably a light-weight, fast, cross platform code editor is essential. Having these as options makes many tasks easy, faster and more concise.