For most of the years I have been in the IT industry, I have worked with the “fat” Visual Studio from Microsoft. Fat in terms of features, for sure, but also in size and load times. It made no sense to use an other IDE, while developing software with VB.NET/C#. But with the advent of Node.JS JavaScript, so far only known as a scripting language for web pages, outgrew itself and became a serious competitor to established languages.
In 2012 Adobe came out with Brackets, a lightweight IDE for developing web applications, written with the very same tech stack: HTML, CSS and JavaScript! Based on the Chromium Embedded Framework, it felt like a normal application! Mind blowing…
In 2015 there was a new kid in town: Visual Studio Code (VS Code), of all things from … Microsoft. During this time, the Redmond-based company had finally jumped on the open source bandwagon and perhaps they saw that Adobe was doing some things right on the IDE market with Brackets (but also some things wrong) and you didn’t want to miss the chance to engage the open source community.
The speed with which VS Code passed other IDE’s in the developer favor was quite amazing, due to the fact that the source code was openly available on GitHub and the developers in Switzerland released a new version every damn month.
What was exciting for me was the question of how long it would take for someone to make this IDE based on web technology available online, i.e. in a browser. It took until 2021…
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