# VS Code 273 Hacker News commenters recommended VS Code and 241 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 2 years (6 owners). **Verdict:** A free, extensible editor that handles almost any language well enough out of the box, with strong extensions and remote development; critics dislike Microsoft's Copilot push and weaker specialized tooling. ## Why people recommend it - Huge extension ecosystem, highly customizable (5 comments): "a battle honed extensible IDE used by zillions and maintained by $$$ has proved itself miles ahead of the environments for alternatives" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47930265)) "it actually exposes the capability to completely customise every aspect of it and extend it with sandboxed extensions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48144087)) "packages in Emacs, but also for VS Code and other IDEs, that make navigating nested s-expressions a breeze" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412438)) - Good enough and easy to use (4 comments): "Tools like VS Code do the job well enough for the majority of people, with just enough configurability and much greater ease-of-use." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49532281)) "VS Code gives me pretty much everything I need for my daily work without demanding too much from my system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019061)) "For a feature rich workhorse that you can use for developing almost anything straight out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976950)) - Performs well despite Electron (4 comments): "apps like VS Code, Discord, Slack, etc show that with enough effort a team can use those tools to deliver something with relatively much better performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47113570)) "On the exact same box running Windows I was able to have VS Code, Chrome with 15+ tabs, terminals, docker, etc. all running with zero issues." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49349425)) "those orgs actually care about their applications and take great effort to make them feel good despite being built on Electron" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945162)) - Open source with community contributions (3 comments): "at least when I contribute to VSCode, we get to fork the hell out of that codebase as it's MIT licensed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961560)) "VS Code only got better because it was open source though, the community contributed so much." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621578)) "VSCode is open source and ahead, and getting lots of contributions from different companies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638327)) ## What people warn about - Unwanted Copilot and AI push (4 comments): "The supposedly expected functionality is very obviously that it marks copilot co-authored code as copilot co-authored, not the bug that is being reverted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994862)) "Microsoft itself though is currently kinda mismanaging the entire product range between GitHub, VS Code and copilot" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46331560)) "VS Code marketing itself as an "AI code editor" is one of many reasons why I would never consider using VS Code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135006)) - Weaker than dedicated IDEs (3 comments): "For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47857629)) "It remains a text editor with some nice extras (syntax highlighting, navigation) but lacking others (debugger, testing, ...)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980869)) "Even with the work put into configuring VSCode to get it kind of close to it, it still just always feels a bit janky." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804521)) - Plugin bloat and performance issues (4 comments): "I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951092)) "a few people on HN saying how they simply can't live with VS Code's 50ms keystroke latency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928768)) "I tried to start VSCode so that I could evaluate it and, maybe, add some info. as to why I find it more difficult to get into, but it just crashes now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887094)) - Extension security concerns in enterprises (2 comments): "There's also the risk that VS Code is a "trusted" application in many enterprises because developers force it to be." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833251)) "we've completely limited what VSCode extensions they can use down to the named folder version. Which sort of sucks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660435)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Zed](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zed.md): 700 recommend - [GNU Emacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/emacs.md): 648 recommend - [Vim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vim.md): 513 recommend - [Visual Studio Code](https://hackerapproved.com/p/visual-studio-code.md): 485 recommend - [Neovim](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neovim.md): 295 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "VS Code", https://hackerapproved.com/p/vs-code/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).