You do not need a Professional or Enterprise license to use the Visual Studio Build Tools:
> Previously, if the application you were developing was not OSS, installing VSBT was permitted only if you had a valid Visual Studio license (e.g., Visual Studio Community or higher).
From (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/updates-to-visual-stu...). For OSS, you do not even need a Community License anymore.
This does not apply if you're developing closed source:
> if you and your team need to compile and develop proprietary C++ code with Visual Studio, a Visual Studio license will still be required.
That just confirms the parent comment's point. If you're just using the build tools directly, you're fine. If need to develop "with Visual Studio" i.e. the IDE, not just the command line tools, then you need the paid license.
Is the fancy text editor compiling, or the toolchain?
I don’t need visual to write, read, compile, or link any code using the toolchain.