I'm not particular about what editor you choose. I've been looking for a good JS IDE. Webstorm is of course the only real player in this space (with an amazing IDE) but it's pricey. I've been watching VSCode with great interest. However, every time I try the editor it's a huge letdown. Buggy, crashy, shitty and weird interface (they have completely made up their own tabbing/splitting paradigm for example, which is buggy and alien compared to existing patterns). It claims to be an IDE but doesn't come close. I think that one day VSCode will actually be an IDE, but it's been a repeated abject failure to date. Based on the current progression I would avoid it for at least the next year, and then I think its potential will be visible.
A lot of people refer to VSCode as an IDE, but their PR doesn't call it anything more than an extensible editor (perhaps a distinction without a difference). I would hope, for JetBrains' sake, that their commercial IDE stays far ahead of a free editor enhanced by volunteers. That's what their customers are paying for.
I got used to the UI after some time and haven't had stability issues, but a lot of extensions I've tried have been half-baked or worse. My main complaint is that cold startup is too slow to use as an all-purpose editor.
Visual Studio 2015 is the only real player. Have you tried it? I've compared it to every other IDE and nothing comes close. Of course, you need to add quite a few extensions (addons) to make it really nice but other than that, it's got the best autocomplete and the best debugger outside of Chrome Dev Tools.
Add the Node.js Tools for VS and the Tools for Apache Cordova extensions (including the kick-ass VS emulator for Android) and you've got a complete kit for programming JS everywhere. Developing ionic apps with this tool is an absolute dream.
I've extensively used WebStorm, VS2015, and VS Code for writing JavaScript and TypeScript (both server-side and client-side). VS2015 was the worst of the three. When it worked properly, it was pretty good, but it was incredibly bloated and buggy. It installs GBs of extras onto your machine that you have to painstakingly remove and hope they don't mess anything up. I dealt with a bug that required me to remove some packages and not others. It was a nightmare.
WebStorm is the best, but it's absolutely loaded with features that most people won't use. VS Code supports most of these same features, but they must be implemented manually via config files and scripts. A lot of people will prefer the latter approach because it leads to a leaner starting configuration.
I found the debuggers of all three to be fairly similar, although VS Code's was very slightly less usable.
Edit: To clarify, I used VS Code and VS 2015 at the same time. After getting frustrated with both, I switched to WebStorm and haven't looked back. Every time I think up a "nice to have" feature, I find out that it already exists and is configurable via GUI.
I switched from WebStorm to VSCode several months ago and haven't looked back. Tabs are fine now since the last two releases. Occasional crashes, but nothing like Atom which for me was almost unusable.
My favourite thing about VSCode is how fast it is. WebStorm and Atom are dogs.
That's funny, I don't know that it's been referred to as an IDE so much as a more advanced code editor.. which is about all I use it for... I generally have my rightmost screen with iTerm and 3 windows split, one tall, the other two quarter screen... next to the left is VSCode for the project/directory I'm in, left again for browser, left for lync/outlook etc.
As a code editor, I've really liked VS Code.. I haven't ever setup any integrated debugging, or used the tasks options... so I can't comment for that, but for my use it's been very stable.
If you want a full blown IDE with integrated debugging, etc, then you're right, it's less than ideal... having to edit json config files is cumbersome, and I'm guessing they'll get a GUI over that once it's more feature complete... as it stands, the core works well...
Though I do wish I could get pre-tabs behavior back, once I got used to it, I preferred the switcher ui on the left.
You should be able to get most of the old behavior back by adding this to your settings.json: `{"workbench.editor.showTabs": false, "explorer.openEditors.visible": 10}`
