At least with vim/emacs it works over an SSH connection but Eclipse? emacs files or their various incompatible Eclipse plugins (eg famously there were 2 big big plugins for Eclipse at one point and neither of them completely worked). The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their. In years past I saw this same struggle with IntelliJ vs Eclipse or even vim/emacs. For individual use, most of them are <$100/year. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster.