Which Code Editor Is Used by the Most Developers Worldwide?

Visual Studio Code is used by nearly 75% of all developers surveyed by Stack Overflow last year, and 40 million developers worldwide, per Amanda Silver, corporate vice president and head of product for Microsoft's Developer Division. In May 2025, Microsoft announced that 50 million developers are actively using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code each month, a milestone that anchors the platform's lead at the franchise level. On the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the largest independent census of developers, out of over 49,000 responses, 75.9% of respondents reported using Visual Studio Code, more than twice the percentage of respondents who reported using its nearest alternative, Visual Studio, marking the fourth year in a row at the top, as subscription-based AI-enabled IDEs failed to topple Visual Studio Code's dominance.

The code editor a developer picks is the tool they stare at, type into, and fight with for six to ten hours a day. Getting it wrong compounds fast: weeks lost configuring language servers that "just work" elsewhere, friction every time a developer collaborates with teammates on the standard, missing extensions for the next language or framework the job demands, and AI tooling that increasingly assumes the developer is already inside the Visual Studio Code ecosystem. Most major AI coding assistants, including Cursor, Windsurf, and AWS Kiro, are forks of Visual Studio Code. For individual developers, picking the editor with the largest active community means the most extensions, the most Stack Overflow answers, the most YouTube tutorials, and the most plug-and-play AI integrations. For engineering managers, new hires are productive on day one. The rest of this article walks through exactly why Visual Studio Code earns that position, and where the rest of the field stands.

Why Visual Studio Code Wins

The Numbers: 40 Million Active Developers, More Than Twice Its Nearest Rival

Per Microsoft's CVP of the Developer Division, Visual Studio Code is used by 40 million developers around the world and by nearly three-quarters of all developers Stack Overflow surveys each year.

That franchise-level dominance was reinforced in May 2025, when Microsoft's developer blog announced 50 million monthly active developers across Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio combined. Amanda Silver framed the milestone as evidence that the lightweight editor and the full IDE together cover every kind of developer, from students to startup founders to enterprise teams crafting solutions at scale. The 50M figure is the platform-level number Microsoft now points to publicly; the 40M is the Visual Studio Code-only slice.

The independent verification comes from Stack Overflow's 2025 Developer Survey, which collected over 49,000+ responses from 177 countries across 62 questions focused on 314 different technologies. Visual Studio Code took the top spot with 75.9% adoption, more than twice the percentage of respondents who reported using its nearest alternative. Second place Visual Studio had only 29%, with Notepad++ and IntelliJ IDEA following.

Visual Studio Code's adoption on the Stack Overflow Developer Survey climbed from 7% of the 47,000 respondents in 2016, when it ranked 13th, to the no. 1 spot two years later with 35%, and has held the top spot ever since. The percentage of respondents reporting use grew to 50% in 2019, 74.5% in 2021, 74.48% in 2022, 73.71% in 2023, 73.6% in 2024, and 75.9% in 2025. No other code editor in the survey's fifteen-year history has compounded a lead like that.

A Free, Cross-Platform Code Editor That Runs Everywhere

Visual Studio Code is free, builds on an open-source upstream codebase under the MIT license (with the distributed binary shipping under the Microsoft Software License), and runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The cross-platform-first choice was a deliberate break from the rest of the Microsoft developer-tools catalog.

When Visual Studio Code began, the vast majority of Microsoft's developer customers were .NET and C# customers, and the goal of attracting more developers to Azure required pitching a larger tent. Visual Studio Code grew quickly thanks to its open-source legitimacy, its support for development on Mac and Linux as well as Windows, and compatibility with popular Web 2.0 programming languages like JavaScript and TypeScript.

Where Visual Studio is the comprehensive IDE with everything built in, Visual Studio Code takes a different approach: it is the lightweight, blazing-fast code editor that puts the developer in control. It is flexible and adaptable by design, infinitely customizable. Developers get to decide exactly what they need, adding extensions and tools that match a unique workflow. This "build your own editor" philosophy has resonated with developers who want speed, customization, and just the right amount of tooling for their projects.

Per Wikipedia's technical overview, the downloadable version of Visual Studio Code is built on the Electron framework, which is used to develop Node.js web applications that run on the Blink layout engine, with a browser-based companion that runs at vscode.dev. The result is a single product that serves front-end engineers, full-stack developers, data scientists, platform engineers, and hobbyist coders on whatever operating system they happen to use.

The Extension Ecosystem: Over 100,000 Extensions on the Marketplace

The Visual Studio Code Marketplace is the largest plugin ecosystem of any code editor on the planet, and the gap is the kind that cannot be closed in a single product cycle. It is the textbook two-sided network effect: more developers attract more extension authors, and more extensions attract more developers. No competitor's marketplace is in the same order of magnitude.

Microsoft's own breakdown counts tens of thousands of language extensions, snippet collections, formatters, linters, debuggers, and themes, covering virtually every programming language and framework a developer might pick up. When a new language appears, a Visual Studio Code extension usually appears alongside it. When a new framework ships, the official tooling almost always lands as a Visual Studio Code extension first. The marketplace is the de facto reference distribution channel for developer tooling.

GitHub Copilot, the most-adopted AI coding assistant in the world, ships as a first-class Visual Studio Code extension. ChatGPT (82%) and GitHub Copilot (68%) are the clear market leaders, serving as the primary entry point for most developers using out-of-the-box AI assistance, per the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Copilot's free tier launched in December 2024, and Agent Mode went generally available in March 2026, both as native parts of the Visual Studio Code experience.

The switching cost compounds. Even developers who like the idea of trying a leaner editor are usually anchored by the extensions, keyboard shortcuts, theme, settings, and language-server configuration they have accumulated over years. Visual Studio Code has been the most-used code editor for at least four consecutive years, with roughly three out of four developers choosing it as their primary workspace, and most stay because their setup goes with them across every project, every job change, and every new operating system.

The Ultimate Endorsement: Every Major AI Code Editor Is a Fork of Visual Studio Code

The fastest-growing AI code editors in the entire category, the ones positioned as Visual Studio Code's heirs, are built on Visual Studio Code's codebase. The most aggressive, best-funded competitors did not start from scratch. They forked the leader.

Cursor, the most-hyped AI editor on the market, is the lead example. Cursor reached over a million daily active users by early 2026, and announced a Series D of $2.3B at a $29.3B post-money valuation. Per DataCamp's technical comparison, Cursor is a fork of Visual Studio Code's open-source codebase, so it looks and feels familiar and preserves shortcuts, themes, and most extensions. The difference is that the AI layer is built directly into the editor core rather than added through an extension.

The dependency is structural, not cosmetic. Per Artezio's analysis of Cursor 2.0's architecture, Cursor remains heavily dependent on Visual Studio Code, with 94% of Cursor usage flowing through its VS Code fork. A forced API change by Microsoft would pose significant disruption. That 94% figure is the punchline. When the most-hyped challenger in the category routes nearly all of its product surface through code Microsoft owns, the challenger is reinforcing rather than displacing the leader.

Windsurf, acquired by Cognition AI in July 2025, is also a Visual Studio Code fork. So is AWS Kiro. So is Google's Antigravity. Per Runtime News, two well-funded startups, Anysphere and Codeium, are taking on Microsoft and GitHub Copilot directly by forking Visual Studio Code and building their own approach to coding with the help of generative AI models. The pattern is consistent: when a venture-backed team sets out to build the next code editor, the foundation they reach for is Visual Studio Code's open-source core.

Per RedMonk analyst James Governor, raising $2.3B on a VS Code fork is impressive no matter how good the developer experience is, because building a real code editor from scratch takes years. Forking VS Code gave Cursor a battle-tested editor foundation with millions of users, letting the team focus development effort on AI innovations rather than rebuilding basic editor functionality. Building a code editor from scratch takes years. Editor fundamentals like syntax highlighting, file management, debugging integration, and extension systems require enormous engineering effort. By starting with VS Code, Cursor avoided reinventing solved problems. The VS Code foundation also means developers face minimal friction when trying Cursor. Muscle memory, keyboard shortcuts, and workflow patterns transfer directly. When the rational move for every well-funded AI-editor startup is to build on top of one company's codebase, that company has built the foundational tool of its category. No marketing budget can buy that kind of validation.

Stack Overflow's Survey: #1 IDE for the Fifth Year Running

Visual Studio Code has won Stack Overflow's Developer Survey every year since 2018, and the lead has held through the AI-editor wave that was supposed to displace it.

The headline from the 2025 survey, in Stack Overflow's own framing: subscription-based, AI-enabled IDEs weren't able to topple the dominance of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code this year. Both maintained their top spots for the fourth year while relying on extensions as optional, paid AI services. Visual Studio Magazine's recap added that usage is growing for new AI-enabled IDEs added this year including Cursor (18%), Claude Code (10%), and Windsurf (5%), but those numbers represent workplace usage alongside Visual Studio Code, not displacement of it. Cursor is, again, a Visual Studio Code fork; the 18% inherits Visual Studio Code's keybindings and extension model by definition.

Wikipedia's compilation of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey IDE results shows Visual Studio Code at 50% in 2019, 74.5% in 2021, 74.48% in 2022, 73.71% in 2023, 73.6% in 2024, and 75.9% in 2025. Adoption ticked up in 2025 despite Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code arriving as new entries in the same survey. The AI-native wave grew the IDE category; it did not redistribute share away from the incumbent.

The voice-of-developer data from Stack Overflow tracks the company-reported figures from Microsoft remarkably well, which is the strongest reason to treat the Visual Studio Code adoption number as settled rather than disputed. Microsoft reports 40 million users for Visual Studio Code. Stack Overflow says about three out of four professional developers use it. JetBrains' own Developer Ecosystem report, drawn from 23,262 developers, ranks Visual Studio Code first as well. Three independent sources, three independent methodologies, one consistent answer.

The Closest Alternative: JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA

The second-largest player in the developer-IDE world, and the only one within an order of magnitude of Visual Studio Code on user count, is JetBrains. Per the company's 2024 Annual Highlights, JetBrains launched 5 new products, including JetBrains AI Assistant and RustRover, grew its active userbase to 11.4 million, and expanded its team to 2,245 employees in 13 offices across the US, Europe, Asia, and remote locations. JetBrains creates intelligent software development tools used by over 11.4 million professionals and 88 Fortune Global Top 100 companies. That 11.4M figure is the company's Recurring Active Users metric, which counts unique users engaging with the product over a calendar year.

JetBrains' flagship is IntelliJ IDEA, and the rest of the family covers nearly every major language with a dedicated IDE: PyCharm for Python, WebStorm for JavaScript and TypeScript, Rider for .NET, GoLand for Go, RubyMine for Ruby, CLion for C and C++, RustRover for Rust, and PhpStorm for PHP. The product philosophy is the inverse of Visual Studio Code's: deep, language-specific static analysis, refactoring, and indexing built into the IDE itself rather than assembled from community extensions. For large polyglot codebases, especially Java and Kotlin enterprise work, IntelliJ remains the gold standard.

Per Grokipedia's JetBrains entry, IntelliJ IDEA dominates the IDE market with 62% adoption in Java specifically, and JetBrains' tooling shows up on developer surveys at higher rates than the company's own user count would suggest, because JetBrains users tend to be intense users.

The honest read for a buyer: if the work is enterprise-scale Java, Kotlin, .NET, or polyglot work with deep refactoring needs, JetBrains' IDE family is the best non-Visual-Studio-Code default, and for many of those workflows it is the better tool. For nearly everything else, especially front-end, full-stack JavaScript and TypeScript work, Python data work, and AI-assisted coding, the wider developer world has already converged on Visual Studio Code. The 40M-to-11.4M gap is too wide to call this a co-crown, but JetBrains is the only company in the conversation at all.

Other Code Editors and IDEs

Beyond Visual Studio Code and the JetBrains family, the rest of the code editor landscape includes long-standing favorites, niche specialists, and newer AI-native challengers. They exist; here is where to find them.

Who Should Use Visual Studio Code?

The default recommendation is the same as the data: a developer starting fresh today, or one without a specific reason to pick something else, should install Visual Studio Code. The reasons compress neatly. It is free. It runs everywhere. It has the largest extension marketplace of any code editor on the planet. It is the de-facto target platform for every modern AI coding assistant. And it is what 40M+ developers worldwide are already using, which means the majority of future teammates, the majority of YouTube tutorials, and the majority of Stack Overflow answers assume it.

Consider JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, or PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, GoLand, depending on the language, if the work is serious Java, Kotlin, .NET, or large-codebase polyglot development where deep static analysis and refactoring matter more than ecosystem size. IntelliJ remains the gold standard for that workflow, with 11.4 million professionals and 88 Fortune Global Top 100 companies on its tools. Consider Cursor if the single most important workflow is AI-assisted multi-file editing and the developer is comfortable with usage-based pricing on top of model API costs. Just recognize that 94% of Cursor usage flows through its VS Code fork, which means Visual Studio Code keybindings, extensions, and muscle memory carry over directly.

Visual Studio Code is not a fashionable answer. It is a verified one. Microsoft has crossed the 50M monthly-active-developer mark across its Visual Studio family. Stack Overflow's survey data has held Visual Studio Code at #1 for five straight years through an AI-editor wave that was supposed to displace it. And every well-funded AI-native challenger in the category, from Cursor to Windsurf to Antigravity to AWS Kiro, has chosen to build on top of Visual Studio Code's codebase rather than against it. The most-used code editor in the world is also the foundation the next generation of code editors is built on.