What is Visual Studio Code?

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Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free code editor made by Microsoft. It was initially released in 2015.
It’s used by many types of coders, including web developers.
It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Why is VS Code so popular?

It’s a good code editor that’s updated frequently with new features.
There are many extensions that let you add more features or customize how it works.
It’s free.
It integrates with Git to let you track changes to your code.
Microsoft also owns GitHub (where people store their projects in Git repositories), so VS Code nicely integrates with GitHub.

VS Code is built with Electron, which enables cross-platform desktop apps to be built with web tech (JavaScript, HTML, & CSS).
That means VS Code can work in a web browser.
For example on any GitHub repository you can hit the period (.) key and you will start editing with a web version of VS Code without downloading or installing anything!

VS Code is currently the most popular code editor and is dominating the industry, but developers have (and still do) use other code editors.
TextMate, Dreamweaver, Brackets, and others have seen their popularity grow and then shrink. Some are no longer being developed (like Atom, which was originally developed by GitHub before Microsoft purchased GitHub).
Sublime Text was the most popular prior VS Code. It’s good, is still being developed, and some developers use it.

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