> There are days when I just write code in Notepad++ and only use Visual Studio to build.

Judging from what I've seen from Windows game programming streamers like Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow, it's not an uncommon practice to live in your preferred editor then flip to VS for build/debug.

It all seems very strange and ridiculous to me coming from a gnu/linux/vim/screen/make/gdb background. Obviously not so much having separate tools, but more the despite having a massive beast of an IDE purportedly providing All The Things, you're still context switching to/from your usable editor.

Those streamers also often resort to using RemedyBG for debugging instead of using VS's integrated debugging. They're basically living without an IDE, while paying all the overhead for an IDE, because the IDE is such trash.