For the record, I've written customizations in most major text editors, here's how I'd rank them in ease of customization, from easiest to hardest: Emacs = Vim

For the record, I've written customizations in most major text editors, here's how I'd rank them in ease of customization, from easiest to hardest: Emacs = Vim > Atom > BBEdit > TextMate > Visual Studio Code It mainly comes down to whether a text editor has a built-in place to quickly add customizations, and whether there's a DSL to quickly wrap shell commands. Visual Studio Code has neither. (Admittedly wrapping shell commands is just the approach to writing customizations that I personally prefer.)