> Once you add panels and toolbars with all sorts of GUI tools, consoles, language servers, remote editing, debugging and built-in commands for common external

> Once you add panels and toolbars with all sorts of GUI tools, consoles, language servers, remote editing, debugging and built-in commands for common external tools like Git - you've got yourself an IDE in my opinion. You can have all (or none) of those features in either an editor or an IDE. The core idea of an IDE was to provide a single UI for all aspects of development — which originally included source code editing, compiling, debugging, and testing. To handle all of these tasks within an IDE required the IDE to have a top-down configuration that would enable it to compile and run the project. Editors like VSCode don’t compile or run anything on their own (though doing so is possible via the integrated terminal). Editors thus normally don’t require a project file. They may use files like tsconfig.json to inform internal language services, but those config files are not specific to VSCode.