After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i
February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie
It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.
It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) showed 37 percent of IBM i developers used VS Code, compared to 56 percent who used RDi and 80 percent who used ADTS, which is composed of greenscreen tools like SEU, PDM, and others.
In the 2025 survey, 54 percent said they used RDi compared to 53 percent for VS Code, making it a statistical dead heat, while 77 percent reported using ADTS. Now in the 2026 survey, 58 percent say they’re using VS Code while 57 percent report using RDi, and 74 percent are ADST users. While the race between RDi and VS Code is still very close, the momentum clearly resides with VS Code.
Fortra 2026 IBM i Marketplace survey.
While RDi is an IBM product (one that it contracts with Fortra to develop and support), the momentum behind VS Code is what motivates IBM to invest in the open source IDE, said IBM i chief architect Steve Will.
“We have tried to push people to doing major development with modern tools, and that’s why RDi got created all those many years ago,” Will said during the webcast announcing the 2026 Marketplace Survey results, which you can view here. “We are investing in the open source tool base of Visual Studio Code because there are so many clients out there who have programmers who are using VS Code, developers who came from the world of doing VS Code. And so we are making sure that we’re supporting that environment as well.”
That investment by IBM comes in the form of IBM-developed tools like debugger and the database extension to Code for i, which is the Liam Allan creation that allows VS Code to support development in IBM i ILE languages like RPG. That investment appears to be paying dividends in the form of greater usage of VS Code and Code for i, which has now been downloaded more than 70,000 times, according to the Code for i page on Microsoft’s VisualStudio Marketplace. That’s up by about 17,000 since July 2025.
The high rate of reported ADTS use may be misleading, Will added.
“Fortunately, when I talk to people, most of the people who are still using the SEU and PDMs are doing it for small changes that they need to do really quickly,” he said. “We are trying to make it as easy as possible for those people to also use the modern tools to do it. But for doing major product projects, they’re using the more modern tools.”
The Marketplace Survey also detected upticks in the use of several tools associated with DevOps, which refers to the modern method of automating the tracking of application development, testing, deployments, and updates.
The reported use of Jenkins – an open source software package for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) – was at 9 percent, up from 7 percent two years ago. Ansible, an open source package used for automating configuration management and application deployment, came in strong with an 11 percent share, up from 10 percent the past two years. Git held steady at 29 percent, the same as last year.
“Jenkins and Ansible continue to appear in the table, and together with the use of Git and Bash, is a strong indication that businesses are putting DevOps approaches to use in IBM i workloads,” Fortra wrote in its survey report.
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