I’m not saying that VSCode is the snappiest editor out there but for all its flaws it’s still the most responsive editor for my use case on moderately sized CUDA/HIP projects.
HIP is definitely a viable option. In fact with some effort you can port large CUDA projects to be compilable with the HIP/ AMD-clang toolchain. This way you don’t have to rewrite the world from scratch in a new language but still be able to run GPU workloads on AMD hardware.