In my experience as a student (and as a prof), being taught concepts without an opportunity to apply them is virtually useless. The course is a special topics on dev tools.
Ignore what these negative commenters are saying. That's a perfectly good idea for a student project, and I would've loved to have a project like that in my university courses.
But I would agree that if someone uses something else like vim or emacs as their primary editor, they should have the option of writing a plugin for their editor of choice. (As long as they accept that the rest of the class will be taught how to write Atom/VS Code extensions and they'll have to do most of the learning on their own.)
I am coming from this from the angle of having done University level teaching. As an undergrad it seems like there is so much time and so much depth of material. When you are teaching a course you realise that there is actually very limited time and so much to cover. If you choose to dwell a long time on one topic you might well find you don't have time to expose your students to the full range of concepts that they need to be exposed to. In the UK for example you have 3-4 years to take students from finishing school to being ready to do research!
