Please, give VSCode a try.

Regarding of extensions, you can give students a repository with .vscode/extensions.json, that will already contain examples. E.g. here is how my extensions.json looks like:

{
    "recommendations": [
        "eamodio.gitlens",
        "georgejames.gjlocate",
        "github.copilot",
        "intersystems-community.servermanager",
        "intersystems-community.sqltools-intersystems-driver",
        "intersystems-community.vscode-objectscript",
        "intersystems.language-server",
        "mohsen1.prettify-json",
        "ms-azuretools.vscode-docker",
        "ms-python.python",
        "ms-python.vscode-pylance",
        "ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers"
    ]
}

This will not install extensions automatically, but they will be shown as recommended for the workspace, like that:

Here is the template they can start from and here is an example extensions.json file.