The code of the editor is completely Open Source, and there’s no payment required to use it. This editor builds on top of decades of editor experience from Microsoft. If you’re looking for suggestions for whether to use it or not, let me say yes, you should switch to it from whatever other editor you are using now. In the last 12 months I’ve been using VS Code, the Open Source editor from Microsoft, and it’s quickly become my favorite editor ever. I largely prefer an editor over an IDE, as it’s faster and gets less in the way. The difference between an IDE and an editor is mostly in the feature set, and complexity. I can remember TextMate, TextWrangler, Espresso, BBEdit, XCode, Coda, Brackets, Sublime Text, Atom, vim, PHPStorm.

I used tons of editors and IDEs in the past few years. In the Unix world you have those Emacs vs vi “wars”, and I kind of imagine why so much time is spend debating the advantages of one versus another.

Some people defend their editor choice strenuously. Since the beginning, editors are a strange beast.

Visual studio code format on type