What’s different between Vscode and other editors like Vim is how easy it is to make it a fully fledged IDE. Usually a notification pops up about analyzers being available, and if you click accept it’s done. Just one click of a button.

With Vim it’s not that easy. You need to install many separate plugins just to make it a fraction of an IDE.

Seems unnecessarily pedantic 🤷

You could call vscode a “DIY IDE Building Kit” because everybody is using it that way.

After you put all the extensions together you basically got a fully featured “IDE” for most languages out there.

Nobody I know uses vscode like a simple “code editor”.

I think that whether it needs plugins or not to do the job isn’t really relevant.

You can develop software in a large number of languages including writing the code (with intelligent code completion), building it, committing it to source control and running and debugging it.

If it didn’t use plugins to do that then it’d huge and take ages to start up.