I'm a Mac user with a strong preference for the superior and consistent kind of UI that great Mac apps are known for, but I use VS Code.

It's UI polish is nowhere near the level of something like BBEdit — which I still do use for some text-related tasks, e.g. formatting weirdly encoded CSV files or something like that — but VS Code also provides real and valuable features that no native Mac programming editor does.

For me, the TypeScript integration, auto-complete, in-editor as-you-type linting, and highly functional project-wide features like "jump to definition" and "find all references" provide me with real utility that no "real" Mac app has.

To get those features, I'd have to be looking at something like Webstorm, which is a huge bloated Java behemoth, with an even more alien UI and even worse performance.

I would totally pay $100 for a nice fully-native fully-Mac editor that did everything VS Code does, but there isn't one.

> And yet a sizable number of Mac users choose to use it.

Yes, but that doesn't change that VSCode isn't a well-behaving Mac App. Yeah, VSCode is a pretty great app, but it's not because of it's UI.

But not because it’s a good Mac app, but because there’s not always a good alternative for good language integration. I’m only using it because the Go plugin is pretty good and the one from Sublime Text isn’t.

A sizable number of Mac users are not really Mac users, they happen to use a Mac at work or for some other reason, and usually end using the likes of Chrome, GIMP, Gmail, Google Docs, and all manner of Electron apps.

I've been using Macs since the early 90s, and VSC is fine for me. All the skeuomorphic stuff Apple has put out pretty much shits all over any widget purity arguments IMO. Most users don't care, they just don't want it to look ugly or like a bad windows port.

> Most users don't care, they just don't want it to look ugly or like a bad windows port.

I’m very surprised at that, since myself and most of my friends value very much of how the UI is Cocoa.

I’m pretty sure a majority of the macOS user base considers the macOS look-and-feel very importantly.

Well I’ll back up the grandparent comment: I don’t want it to look crap, but it being entirely native Cocoa doesn’t bother me either way. It’s nice when an app is, but as long as it’s not horrible to look at or use, I’m happy. I know a lot of my fellow developers where I work are the same way, so I don’t know how true your thesis is on the majority wanting “give me Cocoa or give me death” — but I’m arguing anecdotes with anecdotes haha

A sizeable amt of Mac users who use VSCode are also not like what you’re talking about. An easy way to see this is by going through GitHub repos relating to Mac geekiness and seeing VSCode represented quite a bit. How many general code editors are alive today that are truly “Mac” apps? Sublime sure isn’t to me. Coda is pretty specific to web dev. BBEdit and Textmate 2. The latter of which is sometimes mocked and barely used.

TextMate is mocked? Why?

It didn’t get updated for a very long time. Textmate 2 was in production for a long time. When it came out many had switched from Textmate already. And Textmate 2 missed many features that newer editors have while also not having much of an ecosystem any more.

So a common mocking is something like Textmate? Yeah I used that a decade ago, etc.