What's the best IDE in 2025? : VS Code Discussion Forums

According to the 2025 @Stack Overflow Developer Survey (49,000+ participants), @VS Code and @Visual Studio remain the most used dev environments, despite the rise of subscription-based, AI-enabled code editors—@Cursor and @Windsurf among others. Both maintain their top spots relying on extensions as optional, paid AI services like @Github Copilot and @Kilo Code.

Curious which IDE the Product Hunt community uses the most?

I think Fleet will get word in the near future once they open the plugin marketplace.

do you refer to dimension.dev (the makers of @Fleet)? looks promising indeed, really eager to give it a spin cc @xtremedevx

@fmerian I was referring to JetBrains Fleet code editor

oh right! looking forward to it. have you played around with @Junie?

btw would love to have your inputs in this thread: Best JetBrains plugins

Open source contributions, Microsoft backing and most versatile plugin ecosystem. VSCode is the best IDE for general coding and Jetbrains for language specific(Go, Java) coders

@vatsmi spot on! any experience with @JetBrains IDEs? would love to have your input in this related thread

I still stick with VS Code — open source, lightweight, super flexible with extensions, and optional AI tools make it hard to beat 🚀.

@1001binary ooc — have you experimented with AI code editors like @Cursor or @Claude Code? do you use AI plugins with @VS Code?

@fmerian I haven’t experimented with AI code editors like @Cursor or @Claude Code yet. I often use Copilot in @VS Code , which is enough for me for now. I’ve heard a lot about Cursor and Claude Code, and I hope to try them someday.

e.g. I used Visual Studio Code to develop the Woorollback Pro plugin. Here's a screenshot of my editor:

@1001binary @fmerian I used to use @Cursor, and then @Windsurf. Once I started using @Claude Code as my AI agent, I switched back to VS-code. I lost the excellent tab-complete from @Windsurf , but I think the stability of the OG VS-code is worth more than tab-complete when Claude is writing most of the code anyway.

I don’t write much code these days so take my opinion with a grain of salt lol. I’m still using @Neovim and I can’t imagine ever moving off of it. I read a lot of code, and it’s still the fastest and easiest way for me to quickly find what I’m looking for.

Plus, I love just tinkering around with customizing it exactly how I want it.

I know a lot of other IDEs have Vim bindings, but none of them have ever felt as natural as just using the real thing.

@jakecrump how do you ask questions of the code via AI? Copy/paste somewhere.

@mikekerzhner I use this plugin to pop open a terminal window in Neovim with Claude Code ready to go. It makes it super easy to ask questions without having to copy/paste or even have Claude Code running in a separate iTerm tab.

@jakecrump very cool, didn't know about the plugin!

@Claude Code terminal in @Cursor.

Most of my prompts are to Claude Code.
Cursor is really nice for tab complete.
Claude Code has had reliability issues recently. It's really nice to be able to quickly switch to prompting Cursor when Claude Code is down.

Another person on our team uses @opencode instead of Claude Code, and I hear great things. I also hear that @Github Copilot has gotten quite a bit better. So I wouldn't mind going back to VS Code + Copilot + Claude Code in terminal.

@mikekerzhner great combo!

VS Code still takes the crown for me. It's open source, fast, tons of extensions, and now all the AI tools plug right in.

Copilot covers most use cases, and if I need to experiment with AI agents, I can swap between Claude Code and Cursor. For anything language-specific (Go, Java), JetBrains IDEs are solid picks.

But honestly, what matters is stability, easy AI integration, and not having to fight your editor. That’s why VS Code stays on top.

yep, @VS Code is definitely leading the way. @sanskarix curious what are your favorite extensions?

I prefer VScode for its clean and spacious interface. Also the copilot chat is now great. However, when I want to build something quick with AI, I use cursor. I am used to it now. But when something is mission critical like debugging, writing own code and manual fixes, I use VS code