I switched form VSCode to PHPStorm half a year ago, and while it feels a bit slower, the improvements are so unbelievable worth it for me. It does have a taste for memory, but then again, it easily saves me a lot of time each month, so just throwing RAM at it was a no-brainer for me.
Depends... I'll open/close a few times a day as I touch several projects. I can use VS Code for everything from db/sql, react, node and c# (.net core) projects. I also have used it for a little rust and golang.
As to the RAM, it's using around 1.2gb between vs code and the connecting server (WSL2), multiple isntances vary... but with the number of containers and VMs I'm running, I'm generally well over 16gb of use, and I have 64gb on my desktop. So even without VS Code, I have trouble on a 16gb system.
Yeah, IntelliJ-based IDEs are hungry, but even if mobile, I figure I'd just spend the extra money to get plenty of RAM, it's that good (to me at least).
I usually run 3-5 instances for different projects and it'll hover around 3gb RAM, but it appears that they share a lot of memory, closing one or opening an additional project has no visible impact.
In my case, often several times an hour. I work across 6-10 dofferent repositories. Opening them all at once is impractical, so being able to open each of the them quickly is quite important.
The problem I have with this is it makes "Go to file" functionality a bit too broad. e.g. If I want to open `package.json` I now have to choose between 10 different files. As I often `Cmd-P`, type pa, `Enter` without even looking, this makes it considerably slower.
I also have to do a lot of context switching (e.g. to review someone else's code), and being able to have a separate set of tabs (even within the same repo) is super-useful for this.
At previous jobs with less separated out code, I have taken this approach (although with Sublime Text rather than VSCode).
Agreed... deeply nested directory structures are also pretty painful.
Even in the mono-repos I work with, I'll generally open an editor per inner repo. Mostly ./feature/featurename/filename is as far as I have to open. Some of the C# projects are deeper though.
I switched form VSCode to PHPStorm half a year ago, and while it feels a bit slower, the improvements are so unbelievable worth it for me. It does have a taste for memory, but then again, it easily saves me a lot of time each month, so just throwing RAM at it was a no-brainer for me.