As far as I’m concerned, as long as the editor alone can handle every step of the process from development to testing to version control to deployment to debugging, it’s an IDE.

I don’t care if it doesn’t natively ship with all these things and you have to append them with plugins. (I thought we championed software that doesn’t force bloat features we’ll never use down our throats?) The only applicable factors are that it exposes the extensibility to add them, and that someone has added them.

Does that make EMACS and Vim IDEs, too? If you’ve sufficiently tricked them out with plugins, extensions, and helper scripts to do every part of your pipeline without leaving the editor, then I guess so! It is an Environment that has Integrated everything you need for Development. If it quacks like a duck…

VS Code is an IDE, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.