I switched to VSCode because it has a free editor with a really great jump to file hotkey.

I remember when the big VS added jump to file but it was so damn miserably implemented as to be useless.

Having worked at Microsoft for a decade, the most frequent way I navigated a large source tree was dir /s *partialfilename*.*

Then again while I was there, most code bases couldn't even open in Visual Studio. (highly team dependent, I was mostly on older C/C++ code bases.)

Some teams at MS paid for an editor called Source Insight, which indexed your code and could also parse C #defines and other preprocessor macros, which was super unique and powerful. It had an incredibly powerful symbol and fuzzy filename search capabilities, I'd frequently have Source Insight open just so I could find where in a folder structure a file was and then I'd open it up in my preferred editor.

Back when I got my first SSD the largest boost to my dev productivity was not in compile times (large C++ code bases tend to template bound more so than IO bound), it was how fast I could find files in the directory structure.

I'm sure Vi/Emacs users have some magic set of plugins that do all of this for them, but as someone back on Windows back in the 2000s and 2010s, the supported MS tooling was horrible at all this.

Then VS Code comes along with amazing fuzzy file name matching. Holy cow. Sure it is missing 90% of the power of real Visual Studio (being able to have a debugger step from front end web code to your backend and then into stored procedures in SQL, running on a remote machine, that your debugger transparently auth'd to, is something Microsoft had working 20 years ago and would be considered impossible dark magic with today's tooling), but wow can I navigate a project quickly!