Why I switched from VSCode to Notepad++

Lately (as in, for the past few monthly identity crises), I've been looking into how to have fun with this whole website-making business again. Don't get me wrong, I never stopped loving the indie web, but in an effort to cater to all kinds of users I ended up burning myself out a little bit.

I've come to the realization that I am a perfectionist a while back. This in itself isn't inherently bad, though when coupled with my unfortunate obsession with pleasing others it does tend to be a stress factor. In the realm of web design, this manifested in everything needing to be a «good» experience to every user- everything had to be fully accessible, mobile-responsive, optimized.

Now, don't get me wrong. These things are important, in fact I still concern myself with making a relatively accessible experience. I'll add that if you're commited to making your site fully accessible for anyone, I think that's pretty cool.

With that being said, I've completely given up on having a mobile-responsive personal website. To be honest, I do not feel like I have the reach or the importance to appeal to users who are most likely just going to use the Internet for social media. I feel it's a step in the right direction to get rid of my people-pleasing nature, to primarily create my own website for, well, myself.

Now, you might be pondering what on Earth this has to do with the text editors mentioned in the title. To be honest, they're only tangentially related to this thought process, but allow me to explain. VSCode (and, by extension, VSCodium) is a very powerful text editor. It allows users to directly push to GitHub, allows them to make their workflow faster and includes a myriad of extensions. It's what I was using for about 3 years, yet I uninstalled it from my system and started using the far, far simpler Notepad++.

If you're a webmaster with some experience, try picturing yourself at the beginning of your coding journey. If you're like me, you had a blast learning all these new things, writing each HTML tag individually on your OS's default text editor. Wasn't that fun, even if it was frustrating at times?

VSCode offers a lot of things that I'm not really interested in at the moment. Honestly, the autocomplete feature was actually damaging my ability to write proper HTML (yes, I know you can turn it off, but still)- I found myself relying too much on it. Things kind of just work with VSCode, but part of the process that I enjoy when it comes to making websites is finding and solving problems... even if they're as small as a tag I forgot to close.

I'm not a professional here. I'm just a random fucker with a website hosted on Neocities. I don't need the greatest workflow or the best code ever, mostly because this is just a little passion project. Perhaps this makes no sense, perhaps one day I'll use VSCode again, but dowgrading to Notepad++ represents to me a return to the roots of my coding journey.