# Why Visual Studio Code

Code editor morphing into an Integrated Development Environment.

## Competition

Competitors include:

- [Spyder IDE](https://www.spyder-ide.org/), which has better support for data exploration

- [Atom](https://atom.io/), with a design similar to VS Code; however, with Microsoft buying GitHub in 2018, most of the improvements are now made to VS Code

- [PyCharm](https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/) is a full-featured IDE. It offers slightly better refactoring options than VS Code. It requires a commercial license for some data science options, and is more heavy-weight than VS Code, but for its configuration and CPU/memory usage.


Advantages of VS Code:

- integrates well with modern Python tooling 
- handles multiple languages (including LaTeX!)
- many extensions for Python-related tools
- quite lightweight, both in resource use and user interface


Disadvantages:

- designed for a single editor window (with split code panes), and use with multiple monitors is [messy](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47260995/visual-studio-code-tabs-editors-of-the-same-project-in-multiple-screens
)

- the extension ecosystem needs a bit of curation: for every task, there may be several plugins corresponding to it