I use Git instead of SVN (Subversion) because it allows us to scale our development team. At any given time, the Zulip open source project has hundreds of open pull requests from tens of contributors, each in various stages of the pipeline. Git's workflow makes it very easy to context switch between different feature branches.

I've been excited about Git ever since it got a built-in UI. It's the perfect combination of a really solid, simple data model, which allows an experienced user to predict precisely what a Git subcommand will do, often without needing to read the documentation (see the slides linked from the attached article for details). Most important to me as the lead developer of a large open source project (Zulip) is that it makes it possible to build a really clean, clear development history that I regularly use to understand details of our code history that are critical to making correct changes.

And it performs really, really well. In 2014, I managed Dropbox's migration from Mercurial to Git. And just switching tools made just about every common operation (git status, git log, git commit etc.) 2-10x faster than with Mercurial. It makes sense if you think about it, since Git was designed to perform well with Linux, one of the largest open source projects out there, but it was still a huge productivity increase that we got basically for free.

If you're learning Git, I highly recommend reading the other sections of Zulip's Git Guide; we get a lot of positive feedback from developers on it being a useful resource even for their projects unrelated to Zulip.

I use Visual Studio Code because at this time is a mature software and I can do practically everything using it.

• It's free and open source: The project is hosted on GitHub and it’s free to download, fork, modify and contribute to the project.

• Multi-platform: You can download binaries for different platforms, included Windows (x64), MacOS and Linux (.rpm and .deb packages)

• LightWeight: It runs smoothly in different devices. It has an average memory and CPU usage. Starts almost immediately and it’s very stable.

• Extended language support: Supports by default the majority of the most used languages and syntax like JavaScript, HTML, C#, Swift, Java, PHP, Python and others. Also, VS Code supports different file types associated to projects like .ini, .properties, XML and JSON files.

• Integrated tools: Includes an integrated terminal, debugger, problem list and console output inspector. The project navigator sidebar is simple and powerful: you can manage your files and folders with ease. The command palette helps you find commands by text. The search widget has a powerful auto-complete feature to search and find your files.

• Extensible and configurable: There are many extensions available for every language supported, including syntax highlighters, IntelliSense and code completion, and debuggers. There are also extension to manage application configuration and architecture like Docker and Jenkins.

• Integrated with Git: You can visually manage your project repositories, pull, commit and push your changes, and easy conflict resolution.( there is support for SVN (Subversion) users by plugin)