Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s incredible to me how many people choose VS Code because of its aesthetics No. VS code is popular because it's 1. Free and open source 2. Come with a lot of official extension [1] 3. Backed by MS which has the incentive to commondize code editors It's quite similar to Chrome. [1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Microsoft
Jetbrains has plenty of extensions (1st party, high quality plugins that are far better than some of the 1st party Microsoft plugins) and no one cares if it's by Microsoft (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?). Honestly, I doubt most people even care it's kind-of open source (1). > 1. Free This is the reason most people use vscode. That's it. It's free, and it's p…
Average users might not care. But extension authors do. Yes, of course you can write extensions for close source projects, but it'd take longer to do "hacky" things since you'll need to read decompiled code / memory stack to understand its internals. I remember a very popular extension used a private field (and later broke because VSCode changed its internal implementation).
I personally constantly check Blender's source code here and there during the development for our internal Python tools, so I suppose people who write VSCode extension sometimes do.
> (what does "commondize code editors" even mean? Do you really think any vscode users care?).
It means VScode benefits MS indirectly and they can keep it free indefinitely while being a for-profit company.