I get that it’s open source provided you use codium not code but I still find that interesting
eli5, but isn’t visual studio code a part of visual studio? or why is it not? or is this like a java/javascript thing where they are named similar because of popularity but have no codebase in common?
Those two are completely different products.
Visual Studio is a full IDE which include full microsoft SDK (C++, .net, etc), while VSCode is a text editor forked from Github’s Atom text editor (which was the precursor of the Electron framework), with a javacript editor core called Monaco.
The line is getting blurrier these days, but in general:
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with visual studio, you don’t need to install anything else in order to build a windows app or a .net app. In comparison, with VSCode, in addition to installing various extensions in order to reach feature parity, you’ll need to install the compilers and various libraries separately.
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using VSCode as a default text editor is no brainer as it launches in a few seconds. On the other hand, if you set visual studio as a default text editor, merely opening a text file can take significantly long time due to waiting for the ide to initialize.
