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VS Code — Trivia & Interesting Facts

Surprising, historical, and little-known facts about Visual Studio Code.

VS Code was built on Electron, which was created for the Atom editor that VS Code killed

VS Code is built on Electron (originally called Atom Shell), a framework GitHub created for their Atom text editor. The irony is that VS Code, built on Atom's own framework, so thoroughly outcompeted Atom that GitHub (by then owned by Microsoft) discontinued Atom in December 2022. VS Code used Electron more efficiently than Atom ever did, proving the framework wasn't the performance problem.

VS Code has over 75% market share among developers

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023 found that VS Code is used by approximately 73.7% of developers, making it the most popular code editor in history by a massive margin. The second-place editor (Visual Studio, at ~28%) isn't even close. This dominance is unprecedented — no single editor has ever captured this much of the market.

Erich Gamma, co-author of "Design Patterns," led the VS Code development team

Erich Gamma, one of the four authors of the landmark "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" (1994) — the "Gang of Four" book — led the development of VS Code at Microsoft's Zurich office. His experience building Eclipse (he was also the lead of the Eclipse JDT) directly influenced VS Code's architecture, particularly the extension API and language server protocol.

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) was invented for VS Code and changed the entire editor ecosystem

Before LSP, every editor needed its own language-specific plugin for each programming language (syntax highlighting, autocompletion, go-to-definition). LSP, created by Microsoft for VS Code in 2016, defined a standard protocol between editors and language servers. One language server now works with any editor that supports LSP. This dramatically reduced the effort to support new languages and editors — a textbook example of the N*M to N+M problem.

VS Code uses ripgrep for its search functionality

The built-in file search in VS Code (Ctrl+Shift+F) is powered by ripgrep (rg), the Rust-based search tool. Microsoft chose ripgrep because it was faster than any alternative and handled large codebases without choking. This means ripgrep is used by millions of developers daily through VS Code without them knowing it. The integration happened in 2017 and dramatically improved VS Code's search performance.

VS Code's Remote Development extensions are architecturally radical

VS Code's Remote-SSH, Remote-Containers, and Remote-WSL extensions separate the UI (running locally) from the workspace server (running remotely). The local VS Code talks to a headless VS Code Server over SSH. This architecture means you can edit files on a remote server, inside a Docker container, or in WSL2 with full language intelligence — as if the files were local. This feature alone has made VS Code the default editor for cloud development.

The VS Code marketplace has over 50,000 extensions

The Visual Studio Marketplace hosts over 50,000 extensions for VS Code as of 2024. The most popular extensions (Prettier, ESLint, Python, GitLens) have hundreds of millions of installs. However, extension quality varies dramatically — some extensions are abandoned, some have security vulnerabilities, and some conflict with each other. The marketplace's lack of rigorous vetting has been compared to early mobile app stores.

VS Code is open source, but the Microsoft build is not exactly the same

VS Code's source code is available under the MIT license on GitHub (microsoft/vscode). However, the downloadable builds from Microsoft include proprietary telemetry, branding, and the marketplace connection. VSCodium is a community project that builds VS Code from source without Microsoft's proprietary additions. The distinction between the open-source code and the proprietary distribution is a recurring topic in open-source licensing discussions.

Settings Sync (by Shan Khan) was one of the most popular VS Code extensions, synchronizing settings, keybindings, and extensions across machines via GitHub Gists. It was so essential that Microsoft built native Settings Sync into VS Code in 2020, using Microsoft or GitHub accounts. The original third-party extension had over 3 million installs before the built-in feature replaced it.

VS Code can run entirely in a web browser with no installation

VS Code for the Web (vscode.dev), launched in October 2021, runs the full VS Code editor in a browser with no installation. Navigate to vscode.dev and you can edit GitHub repositories directly. GitHub Codespaces takes this further, providing a full cloud-hosted development environment with compute resources. This browser-based approach means VS Code can run on Chromebooks, iPads, and any device with a modern browser.

The VS Code team ships updates on a strict monthly cadence

VS Code releases a new version every month, with a "Stable" release in the first week and an "Insiders" (preview) build updated daily. This cadence has been maintained since VS Code's public release in April 2015 without exception. The team uses a "feature flag" system to ship code continuously while controlling when features become visible to users — the same technique used by major web services.