Visual Studio Code as a Writing Tool (Premium)

I've long wanted to switch to Markdown for all of my writing, but I have struggled to find an editor that meets my needs. That struggle continues, frankly. But I've recently found myself--and not for the first time--intrigued by the possibility of using the Visual Studio Code developer editor for this purpose.

That it was not designed for this purpose is not a concern: one of Visual Studio Code's core strengths is its extensibility model, and there are numerous free extensions that help transform this already-versatile tool into something that feels more natural for general-purpose writing.

What you don't really get, however, is the WYSIWYG-style of editing that you're familiar with from Microsoft Word and other similar mainstream word-processing apps. Obviously, that will be a deal-breaker for most. But if you're interested in a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, take a look at Typora. It's not perfect, but it's about as good as these things get on Windows.

But I don't really have mainstream needs. More to the point, I've also spent the past several years writing books entirely in Markdown using a code-based editor. For my past three books, I've used an out-of-date and abandoned editor called MarkdownPad 2 that, frankly, I really like. And I even switched to using that tool for all of my writing--including the articles I wrote for Thurrott.com--over a long period of time. The theory there was that it was awkward to use MarkdownPad 2 for the books and Microsoft Word for the rest.

That theory is still valid, I think. Maybe more so now than ever: today I use several different writing "editors"--some combination of Word, Typora, MarkdownPad 2, Notepad, and Notion--depending on what I'm doing. It'd be nice to reduce that count. Maybe not down to just one app, though one can dream. But less is better, for sure.

But what about Visual Studio Code? This product is free and fast, and it's versatile in ways that I suspect most--especially non-developers--don't realize. In Windows Everywhere is Now Available!, for example, I wrote about how I used Visual Studio Code to make several hundred edits across hundreds of Markdown files that make up my book Windows Everywhere in literally one second, thanks to its ability to open a folder and undertake actions (in this case Find and Replace) across all of the compatible files it contains. I also made similar edits to the Windows 11 Field Guide once I belatedly found out about this use case.

But writing? Writing is different, right?

Well, yes. It is. But, as noted, I've already been writing in Markdown, and Visual Studio Code natively supports Markdown. Surely doing so in Visual Code would be possible. Would it be as efficient/easy as doing so with MarkdownPad 2?

The last time I experimented with this, I didn't think so. I did install a few extensions that made this process better, but it just didn't click. (I can't recall how when this was, exactly. It is possible that Visual Studio Code did not at...