Distinguishing VS Code from IDEs seems so forced and unintuitive to me. What's the point?
However it was designed really well in that it has a lot of good integrations which make plugins feel almost integrated and natural. Not to mention the plugin process is the smoothest i've seen of any text editor so for many people it is transparent, they just think they are enabling features and don't realize they are actually just downloading 3,000 plugins.
I'm not trying to argue a no-true-scottsman here. If people want to call it an IDE they can.
But download something from JetBrains and give that a go or something like xCode or the real Visual Studio and you'll see how deeply "integrated" it is, so that it feels like a full featured developer environment from the start, hence the IDE moniker.
There's nothing wrong with VSCode. You can do your whole job in it i'm sure. But compare it to something like JetBrains and it is really really hard to put them truly next to eachother. With enough customization you can get VSCode close, but it sure isn't like that without a lot of customization and plugins from 100 different developers with varying levels of support and reliability.
Fwiw, the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio calls it an IDE and the wikipedia page for VSCode calls it a "source code editor". So maybe as a "source code editor", thats where it bridges the gap between IDE and Text Editor.
AFAIK there were at least 2 of such plugins available, but this was the more popular one, and I don't remember what I tried before giving up, but I do not want to be playing Linux with my IDE. I need it to actually work.
VSCode feels pretty bog standard in the pantheon of IDEs that I've (ab)used over the decades. By default VSCode searches symbols/references, formats code, debugs, has an integrated terminal, handles source control, has smart autocomplete and snippets, etc. I've never harkened back to my days with PhpStorm/PyCharm/VS/Eclipse/CLion/etc and thought "gosh, I wish VSCode did <this-feature>".
To me, if VSCode is closer to Notepad than to NetBeans, then the "text editor" vs "IDE" distinction is virtually meaningless. Ditto for the term "source code editor." I guess it's just personal preference though.
Not that I want those things in VSCode, and if I did there's likely a plugin for that. This is just where I happen to dilineate the two.
If I suddenly want to do C++ development - I need to install it. And it's not easier than it is in VSCode.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/modif...