VS Code

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is my new work bench it is a free, open-source code editor developed by Microsoft, widely used across software development, data work, and increasingly general text/config editing. Unlike a full traditional IDE, it started as a lightweight editor and grew into a highly extensible one — its core is fast and minimal, with almost all specialised functionality (language support, linters, formatters, git tools) added through an enormous ecosystem of extensions rather than built in by default.

Its most-used built-in features include an integrated terminal (running the system’s actual shell, so commands behave identically to a standalone terminal window), a Source Control panel with visual git diffs, staging, and commit tools, and IntelliSense — context-aware autocomplete and inline documentation for many languages out of the box.

Because it’s just a text editor at heart, VS Code works well for far more than writing code: editing configuration files, markdown, YAML, JSON, or plain text notes are all first-class use cases, with syntax highlighting and validation for most common formats built in or available via extension.

Role in this vault

VS Code doesn’t run any AI inference or handle the actual note-writing for this vault — that happens in Obsidian. Instead, it’s the tool used to edit the surrounding project: Quartz configuration files, the wrangler.toml deployment config for Cloudflare Pages, and general project files, alongside its Source Control panel for reviewing, staging, committing, and pushing changes that trigger this vault’s live rebuild and redeploy.