Visual Studio Code, or VS Code for short, is a lightweight but powerful source code editor that runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. (I’m not the only Sublime Text user who doesn’t bother to enter the license on every machine I have-the nag screen is easily dismissed.) What is Visual Studio Code? If you don’t license Sublime Text (or Merge) you’ll see an occasional nag screen. You can evaluate Sublime Text for free, but the code is proprietary, and if you use Sublime Text continuously you should buy a user license for $80, and possibly a Sublime Merge license for $99. You can use Visual Studio Code forever for free, and it is mostly open source. Both products run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

If you step back and look at the bigger picture, Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code are two of the best multi-language, multi-OS programming editors-Sublime Text for its speed as much as its convenient editing features, and Visual Studio Code for even better features and speed that is almost as good. Neither is restricted to JavaScript, or even JavaScript plus HTML and CSS. In my comparisons of JavaScript editors and JavaScript IDEs, my top recommendations often include Sublime Text (as an editor) and Visual Studio Code (as either an editor or an IDE).

Notepad++ vs sublime