Quarto files are just markdown files, so any text editor will work. There is nice support for Neovim, JupyterLab, and RStudio too, if any of those are more familiar.
That said, the Quarto VS.Code extension has some very nice features that I think would be awfully useful in a big project:
- A visual editor to allow a simpler editing experience (could be a pro or con ;-)).
- Completions for document centric things like cross references and bibliographies, completions for yaml configuration options.
- Live preview of LaTeX math, Mermaid and Graphviz diagrams
- Syntax highlight for the markdown and embedded languages
- A nice preview workflow
I'm not sure if those are enough to overcome the lack of familiarity, but thought I'd highlight some of the benefits. Neovim and Rstudio both have very strong features with most or all of the above. Our JuptyerLab extension is more minimal, really only helping with markdown rendering.
We do generally attempt to only include JS dependencies in the HTML output if they are used. We share those dependencies across pages in a website, so if a single page uses a dependency they all will pick it up, but if you have a minimal world view and disable the various interactive goodies, you should get a _relatively_ more thin set of dependencies.
For HTML output, using `minimal: true` in document front matter will give you very minimal HTML that should be ready to style with CSS (and pretty much no dependencies)
https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html