How Microsoft's free code editor went from 13th place to top in two years
In Stack Overflow's 2016 developer survey, Visual Studio Code ranked 13th among popular tools, used by just 7 percent of respondents. Two years later it was number one, and by 2025 about three quarters of more than 49,000 developers surveyed said they used it, over twice the share of its closest rival.
Microsoft unveiled the editor at its Build conference on 29 April 2015 and put out a preview soon after. That November it published the underlying project, Code OSS, on GitHub under the permissive MIT licence, and the editor left preview on 14 April 2016. The version most people download is proprietary, released under a Microsoft licence, but it is built from that open source base, which also means anyone can inspect the usage data it sends home. The telemetry can be switched off.
Its design is deliberately light. The desktop app runs on Electron, a framework for building apps with web technology, and its text engine, codenamed Monaco, is the same one Microsoft uses in its online developer service Azure DevOps. Rather than forcing a formal project structure, it simply opens folders, which lets it work with almost any language. Many functions never appear in menus at all and are reached by typing into a Command Palette, which makes nearly everything available from the keyboard.
Much of its reach comes from extensions. Out of the box it understands JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, CSS and HTML, and can debug Node.js programs, while free add-ons from its marketplace bring support for other languages, debuggers, themes and linters, often through the Language Server Protocol. Other extensions let developers work inside remote servers and containers as if the files were local, and a browser edition edits code without installing anything.
For the adventurous there is Insiders, a nightly build compiled from the day's changes. It installs separately, so it can run alongside the stable editor without disturbing its settings.
Source: Visual Studio Code
