That said, I'm genuinely interested in understanding why you felt that way, is using VSCode considered something to be ashamed of or something, is it because it's a Microsoft product?

PS: I have a strong positive bias towards VSCode due to personal history, so just trying to understand the developer perspective :)

I know, and it's nothing that needs an apology from you. Sometimes people (like me) feel offended over nothing, and it's more interesting for them to question why that is, instead of blamig the other party. That's not to say the reverse can't be true, just that it's tempting and too easy to project one's own offendedness if one isn't careful.

But back to the interesting question of what's up with vscode.

It's a very subjective thing for me, which probably explains the emotional reaction. I'm aware that vscode must be a very solid and practical tool for so many people to use it. But it gives me a negative gut feeling, mostly for the following reasons:

Using what is essentially a browser to edit text feels wrong and bloaty, not unlike going on a cruise ship just so you can eat at a restaurant.

It's made by Microsoft. I'm old enough to remember when they were not ashamed of being openly nasty, how they tried to lock us all into their own walled garden, and the glimpse Internet Explorer gave us into what that would look like. It's hard to trust this company, even if they have taken on a more benign appearance.

So, it just feels very wrong to use a weirdly bloaty browser-editor that a company with a track record of being a Big Bad Influence gives away for free. (I have similar misgivings about Chrome, which does not help vscode.)

Therefore, I prefer dedicated editors and IDEs made by people whose main goal is to make just such tools, and who I can pay for (as a purchase or donation). In summary: vscode works well, but using it makes me feel icky, and there are similar or better alternatives available to me that don't give me such a feeling.

So if there is a public statement that can be read to imply that I'm somehow happily using vscode feels a little like getting mud thrown at me, if that makes any sense, and there's a strong urge to clean up the record and, by extension, myself.

Yeah, I also think it's weird how that works. It's things like this that make me understand better the secret inner workings of people interacting with other people. :)

I got the courage to ask because I felt that you sounded open for a bit of self-introspection. Thanks for taking the time to describe something that's difficult to describe!

When I joined Microsoft in 2007, Visual Studio was at a state that it didn't even have syntax highlighting for Javascript. Many years later, I got so excited when Microsoft hired Erich Gamma from IBM's Eclipse IDE project (long story) because I knew what was coming. VSCode was originally called Monaco editor, built on top of WinJS library, and was just a little web component. Over the years, it changed significantly to become what it is today.

From your perspective of VSCode being a "Microsoft product", I totally get what you're saying, but VSCode has been one of the few exceptions for me for the reasons explained, and more.

The 'nasty' MS hasn't gone away. However their negative actions tend to be swept under the rug as somewhat confined to big biz and govt. Look at their headlines from the last five years for details.