Don't discount free. People can talk about a good craftsman paying for good tools, but corporate developers have to go through the corporate approval process to

Don't discount free. People can talk about a good craftsman paying for good tools, but corporate developers have to go through the corporate approval process to pay for just about anything, so free is friction-free. Before VSCode the king of this was Eclipse. It was free, so it was everywhere, used by a plethora of companies. 2012-2015, when I was using it for vanilla Java development, knowing it let me get up to speed quickly on the Scale IDE, JBoss development from Red Hat, Mulesoft's MuleStudio, Teiid database virtualization, and Salesforce's IDE. VSCode is taking it's place, IMO; Salesforce has switched to it for its IDE.