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I highly recommend modern Emacs over VSCode. If you don't want to tinker, Emacs has multiple levels of preconfigured distributions like Prelude, Nano, and Doom

I highly recommend modern Emacs over VSCode. If you don't want to tinker, Emacs has multiple levels of preconfigured distributions like Prelude, Nano, and Doom Emacs that give the same out of the box working experience. Modern Emacs includes all of the great features of VSCode, plus much more. You get things like: - LSP support for completion, refactoring, listing. - Tree sitter support for super fast highlighting. - File supporter just like VSCodes. - Project management tools. - Fuzzing finding for everything, including files, commands, and buffers. - Probably the best git client out there (magit). It's seriously magical. - Terminals (can pipe terminal contents directly into other buffers). - DAP mode for debugging, ctags, cscope. It's all FOSS, worked on by a non-profit foundation and volunteers, it can be used as a GUI or in the terminal, and it's insanely extensible thanks to it being a small C core running a lisp environment. Lisp is easy to learn and fun, and if you don't like lisp there's still a bazillion more packages you can install for extra features.

kneebonian 4y ago
Switched to Doom Emacs about a year or two ago it has been the biggest improvement in my tools as a developer since becoming proficient with the CLI. That being said there is a bit of a learning curve.
- luxcem 4y ago
  The learning curve can be steep especially if you are used to other keybindings. For vim users, I heard only good things about evil-mode (and it's the default in doom). I personally use default emacs bindings (with a switch between Meta and Ctrl as the Ctrl key is usually poorly located on keyboards).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wicked 4y ago
    If you don't use the caps lock, you can easily change it to be another Ctrl key. It's perfectly positioned for regular use, and how often do you really use the caps lock key? It's great for any application where you use keyboard shortcuts.
jmmv 4y ago
Yes, but what about remote support? That’s the single most thing I miss from VSCode. I want to run my editor on the local machine so that it can benefit from graphics support and integrate properly with the local windowing system, but I want all heavy lifting (LSP and the like) done on a remote machine. Yes, I can use Emacs over SSH (which I do now), but it has limitations. Yes, I could forward X11, but it’s pretty terrible to do so from Windows or macOS. I tried TRAMP in the past, but it didn’t seem to match VSCode’s power at all in this area. Maybe I configured it wrong though, or maybe it has improved. Any thoughts?
- ilovecaching 4y ago
  You can try using emacsserver remotely. I would recommend using SSH proxying instead of messing with emacs over tcp. Personally I use emacs on a large dev machine running in a container in a terminal emulator. I can work from my iPad Pro, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Windows Desktop, Linux Desktop, or any guest machine by just adding one public key. Terminal Emulators are still just GUI apps and fit into the GUI ecosystem. Modern emulators also have true color support, GPU based rendering, full unicode support, support for custom fonts that add additional graphics, etc. You can make a terminal editor look like something incredibly modern if you want to. I personally don't find any value in that, for me the basic appearance of a terminal editor is less distracting.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    The only time I've seen anyone use "emacs server" or "emacsserver" is to refer to the Emacs Lisp needed to make the command emacsclient (the analog to VS Code's "code" command or TextMate's "mate" command) work. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you are using it to refer to running Emacs remotely without a GUI (i.e., with only a terminal emulator as the UI) even though the person you are replying to specifically stated, "I want to run my editor on the local machine so that it can benefit from graphics support and integrate properly with the local windowing system." I am writing this to prevent readers of your comment from ending up more confused than they were before they started reading this thread.
    - 4y ago
modernerd 4y ago
This is compelling! But I ended up abandoning Emacs in previous attempts to switch to it. In case anyone can help solve the pain points I remember: 1. Which project management tools do you recommend? (I think I was using Projectile in the past, but from what I recall it left buffers from previous projects open when switching to other projects, which ended up being kind of annoying.) 2. Any advice about automatic whitespace/indentation handling with Emacs? Ideally I want to have Emacs automatically: - Use a prettier config if present. - Fall back to editorconfig if present. - Infer whitespace from the file if no formatting configs are found. - Match and auto-format indentation when pasting text. That's pretty much how it works with VS Code. I really struggled to recreate this in Emacs the last time I tried, and as silly as it sounds it ultimately put me off using Emacs. (I work across a lot of repos with different languages and conventions; with Emacs I had to double-check every commit for whitespace issues, but with VS Code I rarely think about it.) 3. How do you handle long-running processes in Emacs? I struggled to find a way to run multiple build processes in the background and quickly switch between/kill/read output/restart them. (Is M-x compile the right approach, or is there something else?) 4. Is libvterm still the best terminal emulator for Emacs? From VS Code/tmux I'm used to being able to summon multiple terminal instances with different tabs/ splits, and the experience in Emacs felt less good last time I tried to recreate this.
- Apollo00 4y ago
  >Is libvterm still the best terminal emulator for Emacs? From VS Code/tmux I'm used to being able to summon multiple terminal instances with different tabs/ splits, and the experience in Emacs felt less good last time I tried to recreate this. vterm is awesome, I recommend using multi-vterm if you want more than one
- ilovecaching 4y ago
  Were you trying to make your own config, or use something prerolled like Doom?
  - modernerd 4y ago
    I started with Doom to discover what features were available/useful to me. Then I built my own config from scratch recreating/borrowing only those features. I got pretty close apart from the above sticking points. I only moved on when I realised how much time I was spending writing Emacs Lisp to solve my remaining pain points. I miss it, though!
Blackthorn 4y ago
I've been using emacs for many years but honestly I can't recommend it for new users. Ignore all the features and look at the speed. It's slow, especially when using all those nice features. Big buffers are laggy. LSP in particular is slow. Honestly it's bad enough that I think I'm gonna start looking into neovim. I'll miss the macro support but it's getting harder and harder to excuse the overall slowness.
CJefferson 4y ago
I'm happy people love Emacs, but it's not remotely close to the same "out of the box experience", and I think it will put people off to claim it does. I few months ago I spent a week using Doom Emacs (based on a friend's recommendation). It took days to get used to basic functionality (cut/copy/paste/save/etc), and after a week I still couldn't get error highlighting and running tests to work in Rust. With VSCode, I opened a Rust project and a box popped up saying "hey, want to install the rust plugin", I said yes, it installed (including installing the approriate version of rust-analyzer), and everything worked.

kneebonian 4y ago

Switched to Doom Emacs about a year or two ago it has been the biggest improvement in my tools as a developer since becoming proficient with the CLI. That being said there is a bit of a learning curve.

luxcem 4y ago
The learning curve can be steep especially if you are used to other keybindings. For vim users, I heard only good things about evil-mode (and it's the default in doom). I personally use default emacs bindings (with a switch between Meta and Ctrl as the Ctrl key is usually poorly located on keyboards).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wicked 4y ago
  If you don't use the caps lock, you can easily change it to be another Ctrl key. It's perfectly positioned for regular use, and how often do you really use the caps lock key? It's great for any application where you use keyboard shortcuts.

jmmv 4y ago

Yes, but what about remote support? That’s the single most thing I miss from VSCode. I want to run my editor on the local machine so that it can benefit from graphics support and integrate properly with the local windowing system, but I want all heavy lifting (LSP and the like) done on a remote machine. Yes, I can use Emacs over SSH (which I do now), but it has limitations. Yes, I could forward X11, but it’s pretty terrible to do so from Windows or macOS. I tried TRAMP in the past, but it didn’t seem to match VSCode’s power at all in this area. Maybe I configured it wrong though, or maybe it has improved. Any thoughts?

ilovecaching 4y ago
You can try using emacsserver remotely. I would recommend using SSH proxying instead of messing with emacs over tcp. Personally I use emacs on a large dev machine running in a container in a terminal emulator. I can work from my iPad Pro, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Windows Desktop, Linux Desktop, or any guest machine by just adding one public key. Terminal Emulators are still just GUI apps and fit into the GUI ecosystem. Modern emulators also have true color support, GPU based rendering, full unicode support, support for custom fonts that add additional graphics, etc. You can make a terminal editor look like something incredibly modern if you want to. I personally don't find any value in that, for me the basic appearance of a terminal editor is less distracting.
- hollerith 4y ago
  The only time I've seen anyone use "emacs server" or "emacsserver" is to refer to the Emacs Lisp needed to make the command emacsclient (the analog to VS Code's "code" command or TextMate's "mate" command) work. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you are using it to refer to running Emacs remotely without a GUI (i.e., with only a terminal emulator as the UI) even though the person you are replying to specifically stated, "I want to run my editor on the local machine so that it can benefit from graphics support and integrate properly with the local windowing system." I am writing this to prevent readers of your comment from ending up more confused than they were before they started reading this thread.
  - 4y ago

modernerd 4y ago

This is compelling! But I ended up abandoning Emacs in previous attempts to switch to it. In case anyone can help solve the pain points I remember: 1. Which project management tools do you recommend? (I think I was using Projectile in the past, but from what I recall it left buffers from previous projects open when switching to other projects, which ended up being kind of annoying.) 2. Any advice about automatic whitespace/indentation handling with Emacs? Ideally I want to have Emacs automatically: - Use a prettier config if present. - Fall back to editorconfig if present. - Infer whitespace from the file if no formatting configs are found. - Match and auto-format indentation when pasting text. That's pretty much how it works with VS Code. I really struggled to recreate this in Emacs the last time I tried, and as silly as it sounds it ultimately put me off using Emacs. (I work across a lot of repos with different languages and conventions; with Emacs I had to double-check every commit for whitespace issues, but with VS Code I rarely think about it.) 3. How do you handle long-running processes in Emacs? I struggled to find a way to run multiple build processes in the background and quickly switch between/kill/read output/restart them. (Is M-x compile the right approach, or is there something else?) 4. Is libvterm still the best terminal emulator for Emacs? From VS Code/tmux I'm used to being able to summon multiple terminal instances with different tabs/ splits, and the experience in Emacs felt less good last time I tried to recreate this.

Apollo00 4y ago
>Is libvterm still the best terminal emulator for Emacs? From VS Code/tmux I'm used to being able to summon multiple terminal instances with different tabs/ splits, and the experience in Emacs felt less good last time I tried to recreate this. vterm is awesome, I recommend using multi-vterm if you want more than one
ilovecaching 4y ago
Were you trying to make your own config, or use something prerolled like Doom?
- modernerd 4y ago
  I started with Doom to discover what features were available/useful to me. Then I built my own config from scratch recreating/borrowing only those features. I got pretty close apart from the above sticking points. I only moved on when I realised how much time I was spending writing Emacs Lisp to solve my remaining pain points. I miss it, though!

Blackthorn 4y ago

I've been using emacs for many years but honestly I can't recommend it for new users. Ignore all the features and look at the speed. It's slow, especially when using all those nice features. Big buffers are laggy. LSP in particular is slow. Honestly it's bad enough that I think I'm gonna start looking into neovim. I'll miss the macro support but it's getting harder and harder to excuse the overall slowness.

CJefferson 4y ago

I'm happy people love Emacs, but it's not remotely close to the same "out of the box experience", and I think it will put people off to claim it does. I few months ago I spent a week using Doom Emacs (based on a friend's recommendation). It took days to get used to basic functionality (cut/copy/paste/save/etc), and after a week I still couldn't get error highlighting and running tests to work in Rust. With VSCode, I opened a Rust project and a box popped up saying "hey, want to install the rust plugin", I said yes, it installed (including installing the approriate version of rust-analyzer), and everything worked.