I’ve tried lots of options, and I still go back to vscode.

I’ve extensively used neovim and it has been my main IDE for years, but I got tired of having to spend entire afternoons configuring it. And I had too many total breaks, that had led me to recently abandon it as an IDE, still use it sometimes but much less. It relies on too many plugins, which makes breaks more common imho.

I tried helix. But features are far from what I expect for an IDE, even a modal command line one.

On the gui territory, I tried Lapce, but it’s still buggy and lacks features. Development pace is slow enough so I don’t consider it could become my ide in the near future, I have hopes for it, but not much as it could easily become abandoned before it’s usable.

I wanted to try Zed, but they seems to have a preference for macOS, which may have sense in the US but here I don’t remember the last developer I saw using a mac. There’s now a linux version, which I may try at some point, but some people commented that while in a better state than Lapce it’s not still a production ready option for an text-editor-IDE. Also the company behind it doesn’t inspire trust to me. There’s something about it that smells fishy, I cannot quite put my finger on what, but there’s something.

There are more options, some obscure, some old, some paid. For instance I usually hear good things about jetbrains ide. I tried intellij community and I’m not impressed, it’s slightly better than eclipse, but it’s not on the level of visual studio for dotnet. I’m not a student and I don’t get paid for my hobby developments so paid options are a no-go.

So it is visual studio code for me. Sometimes I still use neovim, as I really like modal editors, and vim/neovim is my go to text editor anyways. I’m due to try emacs, and I’m hopeful for the future of both helix and Lapce, though I manage my emotions as I’ve know too many projects that just never deliver, so I’m cautious.