Similarly, I see people leaving jetbrains every day. VS Code is getting better and better, and jetbrains tools are becoming more and more niche. While jetbrains may always be ahead, the gap is widening.
It does work when you needs something light weight - but it often craps out on large projects - ironically it slows down way more than the IDEs. For example I'm writing a Flutter/Dart project ATM - the VS code plugin becomes unusable after a while of working on the project even on a relatively small ~30kloc project. IDEA works just fine and has much better tools.
This statement kind of misses the point: it's not that 'VS Code is an IDE', rather it's that the value of an IDE may not be as much as what some think it is.
I would have made the same conclusion a decade ago, but with sufficient plugin/ability ... I have come to prefer VS Code along with many others and have little reason to go back to using an IDE.
That's not to deny the IDE uses case - for specific kinds of projects it's fine, but there's no doubt VS Code - a non-IDE - is picking up in an a ton of areas wherein traditionally and IDE would have been a first choice.
And like I said it often craps out on autocomplete alone with larger code bases for me (had this happen in Dart and C#)
It's the perfect IDE/editor for JS/Typescript - the rest is subpar.
I wonder if that is because VsCode runs on top of Electron
I use VSCode on a project that's about 3* that right now (not including things like node modules or config) and it's never failed.
Are you sure the problem lies with VSCode rather than the Flutter/Dart plugin?
So in the end the only decent experience I had with it was Typescript and JS.
Compare that to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. If I was mostly doing Web frontend or node I would 100% use vscode. Otherwise I just find it's too unreliable and I don't want to waste productivity energy on it. (I wish it was on IntelliJ level, I would pay for that with vscode remoting possibilities, more than I pay IntelliJ even)
I see people leaving iOS every day for Android, but this people are balanced out by users going the other way.
The same is true, I believe, for JetBrains and VS Code.
The screen space used is highly configurable, but if it wasn't, I'd agree. I don't care about memory or CPU at all.
Maybe it's different for other languages, I mostly do PHP + JS/HTML/CSS, but PHPStorm vs vscode (+ plugins for both) is not even close, and PHPStorm makes me so much more productive and takes so much annoyance out of my day that investing in a beefier machine seems like a small price to pay. I've easily made that money back once a month just because I get more done.
I like vscode, but I pretty much exclusively use it as a text editor and notepad.
Developing with php should feel fast. I feel like phpstorm slows me down. I like sublime, it opens the last project in .5 seconds. For me ctrl-p start typing is usually quicker than scrolling down a tree structure.
I want to use phpStorm daily again but it gives me zend eclipse flashbacks. I wish they offered a light verson.
The Jetbrains stuff really isn't _that_ heavyweight.
It's a shared process, so they're not each taking up resources (I wish that was changeable, since they've had and continue to have some annoying bugs around it).
A Scintilla-based editor is still going to crush it on the resource usage front.
I still use it at work though because we don't have CLion there and that code base does not use CMake, but only because it is just slightly better than plain VIM with some plugins. But compared to CLion + CMake it's just one small step beyond a glorified text editor.