It is popular because it filled a niche where next to nothing existed, so for people in those fields anything is a step up.

For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.

For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.

Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.

I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.

Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.

There are a ton of editors both free and paid for that niche you mentioned. Visual Studio code wasn't even the first one made with Electron, there was one called Atom before it. I have used and continue to use Sublime Text, and at work they install Notepad++ on all computers by default.

I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.

And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.

> For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.

Sure, if your entire usage is the stuff that VS does well (which is a very narrow range compared to Code), and you are used to VS, it's probably an annoyance.

> I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.

Almost none of the things I do with Code I would have done with Notepad before. There are lots of non-IDE programmers editors that existed before Code. It may not be as good as VS or some IntelliJ variants for the use cases those IDEs are best for, but it's better for almost everything else than almost anything, and even for the things those major commercial IDEs specialize in, it's good enough for lots of specific use cases that when you need to do that plus other things, the context switch of using the commercial IDE for some tasks isn't worth it.

I don't think the (not very good) PowerShell extension is a great basis for judging VS Code as a whole.

I've spent most of my career in Visual Studio, I have a great deal of respect for how it just works, nobody's forcing me to leave it and yet... I'm mostly done with it. I'd rather use VS Code for C# development these days; it nails a lot of speed+UX things that Visual Studio doesn't.

Well, from his point of view he's right to judge it, since he's being forced to use it and it's crap for his use case, extensions or not.

Popular is not the same as quality. That's something that MS seem genuinely unable to understand - examples of a better product are countered with "our product is X times bigger, it is better". Well, no - X times bigger is probably momentum, or network effect, or sneaky placement/contracts - it has nothing to so with the quality of the product.

Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(

That consumes a full core for intellisense the entire time it's running if you have a large c++ codebase.