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I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. S
by novocantico 5y ago
I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code almost exclusively now.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoYeah the LSP ecosystem is so much nicer than the machinations hacked into text editors over the last 20 years. When you get down to it a modern editor is just a process manager for language servers, a global event bus/RPC layer across them all, and a UI layer. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc.
- Hedepig 5y agoI thought LSP was available for emacs?
- bananamerica 5y agoIt is.
- _hl_ 5y agoAbsolutely. Emacs is a great UX layer, only lacking a modern UI rendering layer. Would be nice to have emacs with a DOM-based rendering engine.
- NoGravitas 5y agoI'm not sure I love that idea, but I'm guessing that's the direction Nyxt is heading in.
- novocantico 5y agoI mean I wholeheartedly agree but that nick
- anthk 5y ago>. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc. That's ironic.
- wiz21c 5y agoironic ? it depends on the age of the author :-)
- antiframe 5y agoI feel that VSCode is missing the number one critical feature of Emacs: the ability to inspect and change the program as it's running.
- trey-jones 5y agoAnd don't forget the number two critical feature: the ability to call yourself an Emacs user!
- novocantico 5y agoSure you can. Open up your VS Code extension in a VS Code window and live-debug it. I'd bet the process is probably very similar when editing VS Code yourself, but the point of the extension system is that you usually shouldn't have to.
- antiframe 5y agoThat's cool. The one thing I missed in VS Code when I last used it a few years ago was a link to the implementation in the documentation of each function. Maybe I will give it a try again someday. But honestly giving up Magit, org-mode, slime, and elpy will be hard.
- novocantico 5y agoOne pretty decent Magit alternative I found was lazygit. For a long time after quitting Magit/Emacs I just used git's CLI, but lazygit is pretty great.
- ghosty141 5y agoFor me it doesnt even come close to it. Maybe if you wtite your own plugins but even then there are many limitations. The one-window problem for example. In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer) handles/styles headings. Its crazy! One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things work together. I have orderless installed for matching strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in VSCode you cant even get close to that. VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to „build your text editor“ cause thats what emacs basically is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to fit your exact needs with almost no limitations
- jonpalmisc 5y agoThe cohesion and interoperability of Emacs packages is hard to find elsewhere. When I tried Neovim recently, it was blatantly obvious and I was quickly turned off by how each plugin creates psuedo-TUI elements and prompts for input slightly differently.
- ghosty141 5y agoExactly, it's simply the difference between having a texteditor with plugins vs. having a "vm" that is mainly a text editor.