Discussing editors and IDEs

Our focus in is this book is to explore and learn VS Code, but before we do that, let's discuss the difference between an editor and IDE and try to understand where and how VS Code is positioned for developers.

Over time, several languages and frameworks have become available for developers to work with. Along with these languages, a considerable amount of effort has been put in place to create the right tool to increase developer productivity and support the complete development life cycle.

These tools can be categorized into editors and IDEs.

Editors support a variety of languages, work around files and folders, and they are limited in terms of projects or solutions. They are lightweight and predominantly keyboard-centric, which allows developers to work faster.

IDEs support code editing, compiling, and debugging, as well as code execution. They are mainly specific to a particular language or a few selective languages. They usually work...