This has been my white whale for a bit as I do full-stack development where I’m managing multiple code projects across multiple machines. I have been looking for a VSC replacement as I would prefer another editor. The TL;DR is no, there is no VSC replacement currently.
Emacs has TRAMP+plugins but plugin support is iffy in my experience. Both Emacs and vim work great over terminal, but then you’re using a terminal editor and all that comes with, and you have to copy your settings and configurations to every new machine. I still use Emacs sometimes but prefer a GUI nowadays.
Zed has a remote edit feature in alpha but it relies on sending code to externally hosted servers which is against my company’s policy.
Nova has editing over SFTP but I tried Nova out for a day and found it to be really lacking. SFTP is very slow to edit and many plugins didn’t work with it. Overall language support is quite bad for non-web languages which doesn’t work for me as I regularly write in a bunch of languages.
Sublime Text has several SFTP edit plugins but they are usually paid, and didn’t look appealing enough to me to purchase, so I can’t say yet if they work.
I just straight up couldn’t get Pycharm/IntelliJ’s remote edit feature to work. I honestly think there must have been some network/firewall issue at my company because it would seemingly start up and then just never connect. This makes no sense if it is using SSH in the backend because other SSH programs work, but still debugging…
VSC is buggy, uses lots of RAM, sucks battery life, and is owned by shitty Microsoft. But for me it really is the best tool for the job. I’m optimistic about Zed.
This is the first thing I look for when considering the alternative