Recs.
Updated
Visual Studio Code is a free text editor built for developing and debugging web applications. It is built on top of GitHub's open source Atom components, but some features are removed from it and some others are added.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Extension support
There's a growing number of extensions in Visual Studio Code, including a marketplace.
Pro Open source
Visual Studio Code is open source and released under the MIT license.
Pro Relatively fast
Visual Studio Code has a faster startup time than virtually all other Electron-based editors. The plugin model is also more restrictive than other text editors to prevent issues with bad plugins causing slowdown that plagues editors like Atom.
Pro Small size
VSC is only 40 MB in size. This means that it can be downloaded and installed in seconds.
Pro Just the best text editor
Atom was the first to break the formula for a perfect text editor. Mix the customizability and versatility and community of vim and emacs with the simple UI of Sublime. But Atom was really slow and the UI still didn't mix with its great eco-system. That is where VS Code does it best. It simplifies Atom to create the best text editor. Yeah there are problems here and there. But mostly the editor is the best for coding. Especially if you want to do things with Javascript. The whole text-editor was mainly built for JS.
Pro C# mono support using xbuild
You can easily create and compile C# console apps on non-Windows platforms.
Pro Golang support is great
Despite the debugging which relies on Delve , Golang extensions for VS Code make this editor a really good option to write Go.
Cons
Con Memory hog
Allegedly, VS Code is "lightweight". Yet, running multiple instances of it at once, you may get many "out of memory" messages from Windows despite 16 GB RAM, while of course also running other things. The point is the comparison with some other IDEs/editors where running them alongside the same number of other applications doesn't cause Windows to run out of memory.
Con Still bad performance like all Electron-based editors
If you have I5-6500 or better CPU, as well as fast SSD, there is nothing to worry about. But if your hardware is a little different and somewhat worse, editing will be made difficult by freezes, lags, and slow issues. Performance of VSCode is much better in comparison to that of Atom; but still VSCode is very slow and not usable for large files and for slow PC's.
Another con related to performance is it's very high resource consumption usage. Electron is a Node and Chrome app combination. As such, every time you are running Google Chrome (several tabs) and an extra server for it, you can imagine how much memory and CPU is eaten by VSCode.
In any case, Microsoft is doing a lot of work for optimizations and hopefully one day this app will be much faster than it is now.
Con Electron Based
It is built on the electron framework, effectively making it a web browser that is somehow editing code. This is why it uses a massive amount of RAM and why it can be slow on almost all non-super-high-end machines. Even if it wasn't for performance reasons, it is quite an odd choice to use a web browser to base your IDE on, very questionable software quality.
Con It is made by Microsoft
Microsoft has been known in the tech community for disrespecting users and falsely suing free (as in freedom) software projects. It's only recently that they switched to "support" open source (open source is not free-as-in-freedom software) but that seems to be a PR move as most of their products are still proprietary.
Con Can't open binary files
Visual studio can not open binary files instead it show an error message that either file is binary or in unsupported file format.
Con Embedded Git isn't powerful enough
You can do nothing but to track changes, stage them and commit. No history, visualization, rebasing or cherry-picking – these things are left to git console or external git client.
Con Generalized
VS Code is a general code/scripting IDE built to be lightweight and for people familiar with their language of choice, not directly comparable to Visual Studio in power or scope.
Con Have no good default js style analyzer
In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice.
Con Has no good default js style analyzer
In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Cross-platform
Visual Studio Code is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. This way, you can still use it even if you work on different types of OSes during the day.
Pro Extendable through plug-ins
Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.
Pro Python support
Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con Very limited search function
There is no multi-line search like there is in Sublime Text (you select multiple lines, paste them to search box, and you will find in another opened document the same lines together with spaces, tabs, and \n), so you'll have to manually type in a regex to match it.
UPDATE: Multi-line search was added in October 2018 https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_29
Con No auto-update on Linux
If you want to update the editor, you must reinstall it.
Con No drag'n'drop support
You cannot drag'n'drop text to move or to copy it. Most modern text editors support this already.