What’s stopping you from using it in the terminal view of VSCode? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment so please forgive me if I am.

Maybe you’re saying that you wish VSCose itself was a TUI?

Yes the latter, that it did have a TUI option for its interface.

I think I’ve seen a project running vscode as a server (?) and rendering it in terminal, but I can’t find it now.

There’s a lot of decent TUI editors nowadays though, and with LSP they’re pretty on-par with vscode. Maybe try Micro? https://micro-editor.github.io/

A TUI editor with a lot of the features of VS Code could be pretty cool... Basically a relatively thin shell on the remote editor server.