Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform, extension-driven code editor with IntelliSense-style completion plus integrated Git and debugging workflows. Users praise its versatility and ease of use for many programming workflows, though some complain it can feel resource-intensive and may get slower over time, especially after updates.
VSCodium tops the rankings as a fully open-source build of Code - OSS that removes telemetry while keeping most VS Code functionality and extensibility. Privacy-focused developers who want a VS Code-like experience often choose VSCodium specifically to avoid telemetry, though some Microsoft extensions may be unavailable. Sublime Text ranks second and is repeatedly praised for outstanding speed and being less resource-intensive than VS Code, making it popular with developers on slower machines or large projects.
The alternatives landscape spans lightweight text editors like Vim and Notepad++ to newer AI-first editors like Zed Editor, with over 100 alternatives covering code editors, full IDEs, and terminal-based editors.
Visual Studio Code is a code editor, but the alternatives span different approaches to development workflows. Open source options like VSCodium, Vim, and GNU Emacs appeal to users who want transparent licensing and community-driven tooling. For privacy-focused development, VSCodium and Helix emphasize no-tracking and telemetry prevention features.
Linux users have native options in VSCodium, Kate, and Lapce. Web-based development suits users who want browser-based environments - Replit and Firebase Studio run online for coding without local setup. For developers who live in the terminal, Micro, Neovim, and Helix target command-line workflows useful for SSH-heavy or low-overhead environments.
Text Editor Pro (formerly EditBone) is a powerful text editing tool that comes with syntax highlighting, support for over 50 languages and scripts, 22 different styles, a handy file comparison feature and support for multiple directories and search results.
Cream is a free text editor.
A modern configuration of the powerful and famous Vim , Cream is for Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and FreeBSD.
HippoEDIT is a powerful, fast and easy to use Windows text editor, primarily targeted at power users and programmers. It has modern and lightweight user interface, which supports different interface schemes, Multi Tab environment, seamless web and help browser, File Explorer and...
BlueJ is an Integrated Development Environment for Java, developed mainly for educational purposes, but also suitable for small-scale software development. It was developed to support the learning and teaching of object-oriented programming, and its design differs from other...
Kod is a programmers' editor for OS X
Source available at http://github.com/rsms/kod
Goals and features
Fully concurrent — loading files, syntax highlighting, etc is distributed across available CPU cores. Minimal waiting time.
Integrated scripting environment based on No.
Cursive is a is a ClojureScript IDE available as an extension for IntelliJ IDEA. It provides a full-featured tool-set including advanced structural editing, refactoring, VCS integration and much more, all out of the box.
vy is a modal editor with a very modular architecture. vy is built on top of Tkinter which is one of the most productive graphical toolkits; It permits vy to have such a great programming interface for plugins.
Judge0 IDE is a free and open-source online code editor that allows you to write and execute code from a rich set of languages. It's perfect for anybody who just wants to quickly write and run some code without opening a full-featured IDE on their computer.
Judge0 IDE is the most popular SaaS alternative to Visual Studio Code.
Howl is a general purpose editor that aims to be both lightweight and fully customizable. It is built on top of the very fast LuaJIT runtime, and can be extended in either Lua or Moonscript. It has a minimalistic UI driven mainly by the keyboard.
Lines is a modern and minimalist text editor - IDE with support for over 150 programming languages, embedded code inspectors and many other cool tools to help you write better code.
Caret is a lightweight-but-powerful programmer's editor running as a Chrome Packaged App. Inspired by Sublime and built on top of the Ace editing component, it offers:
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