In this chapter, we took a look at Visual Studio Code more closely. As you've seen, it's a powerful code editor and available free of charge for all major platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac. The main difference between VS Code and Visual Studio is that the latter has project templates, and a whole integrated development environment built-in. VS Code is mainly an editor and a good one at that, but it lacks the majority of the more enterprise-focused features you might find in Visual Studio 2015 and 2017.
VS Code is currently the best tool you have for writing code for an SPFx project. Microsoft recently released the stable version of an extension for Visual Studio that allows projects based on SPFx. This seems like a good alternative, but developers will still need to be comfortable with VS Code, as it's a tool that is widely used and Microsoft is heavily supporting VS Code-based documentation and extensions.