Depends what you do! I've never found anything quite as good as Visual Studio for C/C++ coding and debugging. I can (and have...) got by with Xcode on macOS and

Depends what you do! I've never found anything quite as good as Visual Studio for C/C++ coding and debugging. I can (and have...) got by with Xcode on macOS and CLion on Linux, but they're just not quite as good. (I did a stint doing Go with Visual Studio Code - I suspect the same would apply to using Visual Studio Code for C++, too.) The Visual Studio text editor isn't amazing, but it's good enough that I can put up with it (and I can always load a file into Emacs when I need to do something specific), and the code browsing and code completion typically works well out of the box. The main draw is the debugger, which is decent, and, being integrated, the debugging UI gets to reuse the reasonable text editing UI for looking at and navigating source code. The debugging panels are all independent, can be docked anywhere in the window (or left floating), and arranged into tab groups as the situation demands - a big improvement over most other debuggers I've used, which have a bad habit of providing a single debug state panel and/or not letting you lay things out as you see fit. (Once you leave Visual Studio, the Windows experience isn't always ideal, but you have options, according to personal taste. I have Emacs, Python, git, and the usual GNU tools (git comes with a good set) - and for the stuff I do, that's enough to make the experience pretty consistent whichever OS I'm using.)