@Brandon Thomas That's an extensive comment, thank you for that, it really helped me understand what others before you said briefly. Cheers man

My brief description of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Let's talk about Visual Studio first. What does Visual Studio provide? Visual Studio, at least to my knowledge, is installed in a way that is bound to a compiler. For example, for C++ you can download and use the Intel One API compiler. You will have to setup Visual Studio for that particular compiler. It provides options for that. The advantage is that Visual Studio will provide many many more stuff than just a basic text editor. You will be able to build projects, debug with interactive debugger, have intellisense (at least for languages like C++) and many many more to things like code profiling, Performance metrics and so on. That's why people refer to VS as an IDE; when setup for a language, it sets itself up in a way that provides anything you may need to develop something. The disadvantage is that you may not want all these capabilities and you may prefer something lighter, more flexible, and faster. Now let's talk about Visual Studio Code. What does Visual Studio Code provide out of the box? Nothing. It is only a text editor. You will have to setup everything yourself. You will have to install compilers yourself and point VS Code to the corresponding install locations. You will have to install the debugger yourself and point VS Code to the debugger as well. You want language specific syntax? You will have to install plugins for that. Intellisense? Code snippets? Plugins. Everything is done through plugins. That makes VS Code more flexible but also more difficult to set up. And to clarify: I use VS Code on a daily basis whereas I use VS only when building and testing codebases on Windows. They way I have VS Code setup I can compile and debug code using three languages, I can edit and view markdown files, and I can compose, build and view LaTex documents all in a single window. It is actually amazing. Short note: Since C# is mainly used in Windows, Visual Studio is way better. If C# is your thing, setting up Visual Studio Code to be competitive to Visual Studio will be kinda hard. In contrast, Visual Studio setup will be like 5-6 clicks. For other languages like C, C++, Python etc Visual Studio Code can be setup quite easily. It has easy to configure plugins for everything.

VSC is more lightweight than VS. VSC feels more widely used and it’s quite versatile with the amount of package support. VS feels more geared towards full engine development (but that might just be one aspect of it). I will almost always default someone to using VSC, especially if they are early on. It’s not about “you look more sophisticated as a coder using VS and it takes more skill” or silly reasons like that….VSC is just more anecdotally popular and I think you kick yourself off on it quicker than on VS. Majority of your work will more likely not require the massive expansive environment of VS. VSC has a tremendous beautiful environment as well, but much more lightweight.

It doesn't really matter what you make your projects in. VS or VSCode is just a tool. If you want the full experience of an IDE, then VS is a good option. If you just want a highly customizable editor, then VSCode is the way to go. For a better overview of the differences, I recommend just doing a google search, but IMHO it largely comes down to preference.

VS Code is love. VS Code is life. The only exception (I can think of) is when you're programming .NET, in which case you might want to take advantage of Visual Studio's built-in feature. But VS Code is so much more lightweight and such a smoother experience. (And for .NET, you might be better off using Rider anyway, if you can afford it!)

For quick edits, I personally boot up VS Code For projects (Primarily desktop apps in C#) - I will load up VS I much prefer the debugging potential in VS over VSCode.

I wouldn't call VSCode light, it runs of Chromium.

VSCode is like a basic text editor with an extremely powerful plugin system that provide ide-like functionality. Plugins are very loosely integrated. Usually by dropping command in a do-everything palette and hooking some events. Some can provide GUI but most don't. Config is usually done by json. You can have some issue like multiple plugins that fight each other to format your code. You can 100% have good experience in vscode. But the barrier to entry for a plugin is very low. And this mean there's just way more language supported in vscode than vs. For example if you want to edit a markdown or latex file with instant preview, vscode is a better editor than vs. Sure you can edit your file in vs, but with lower amount of features. So in total vs support less languages, but when it does support it, it's a very smooth ride.

If I'm developing something for windows only. I go VS all the way, the debugging experience is second to none IMO. But if you need to develop cross-platform or on other OSes, VSCode wins out. Remote developing over ssh or containers (which I do day to day) then VSCode is a doddle for that.

I’d say that was fair, except with different keybindings. If you want to wrangle text, it’s probably the best tool for doing that right now. It’s refactoring capabilities are not nearly so refined as VS though.