brent hard to find. is there a foss one you'd recommend?
Obviously your question wasn't aimed at me, but for decades I used Visual Studio from Microsoft on a nearly all day/every day basis. When I retired, I experimented with the somewhat stripped down version that's FOSS here, but I really haven't done much with it. For most purposes, I've found Gedit and Kate to both be very versatile and capable, depending on which one was available on the particular system/DE. And both are in the repository, so the DE doesn't actually matter much.
A really handy thing for me is that the Micro CLI editor uses the same shortcuts that Gedit and Kate do, for example, CTRL+O to open a file, CTRL+S to save one, and CTRL+Q to quit. So, that's the editor I always use in the terminal. I know how to use others, like Nano. I just don't like them.