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In a way VSCode is kind of this generation's emacs, I guess. Scriptable, does "Everything", etc. It's just not as... magic. And it's not Free Software with the

In a way VSCode is kind of this generation's emacs, I guess. Scriptable, does "Everything", etc. It's just not as... magic. And it's not Free Software with the same spirit that made emacs cool. You can, in fact, glue everything together in emacs to get a rather all-encompassing environment; IDE-like code editing, navigation, etc. even copilot and such (but yes, sans the slack and browser, etc. as you say). But I've found it will always be brittle. And, yes, back in the day I had it all inside emacs.. IRC, LambdaMOO, email, code editing. All in one place running on my 8MB 486. There's nothing like that now, but, yes, the GUI environment does it all. It's the same reason why tiling window managers never click for me -- all the applications I use all have their own "tiling" that ends up fighting with it. CLion, Firefox, Emacs, Discord, Slack, Teams... they've all got their own internal nav, with the expectation of a typical GUI environment. All that said... Saying "just use Vim" is kind of missing the point. I (and others) hate modal editors, and if I liked them I would have used vi back in the day in the first place as it was always one very machine I shelled into. The modal editing thing as some sort of mark of superiority or pride... is a bit of a recent obsession of a subset of nerd culture that I don't get, nor do I care to. And I strongly disagree that "but a good editor" line; the editor in emacs is great. But no, it's not vi, and no, it's not windows/mac keybindings. You have to learn its keybindings and yanking and all that.

AlanYx 3y ago
Does anyone really script VScode in the same way as emacs? It's trivial to knock-off a little function in emacs to scratch an itch, but in VScode there's so much boilerplate to create an extension.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree, and I don't personally use VSCode. But it sorta fills a similar niche, I guess. But it's missing the powerful buffer abstraction that makes emacs so special. An emacs buffer isn't just a text editor, it's an interactive working environment, a coding scratchpad, etc. closer to how old Smalltalk or Lisp environments worked. The same buffer concept can be simultaneously a terminal, a code editor, and a REPL.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    > The same buffer concept can be simultaneously a terminal, a code editor, and a REPL. On the technical side, VS Code can do the same, and does it to some degree. I mean, it's a Web-browser in disguise, it can show anything you want. But overall there is indeed not much awareness for this and not many features and plugins supporting this. It simply has more order and control on this level. But I guess it's also just one plugin away on changing this.
    - AlanYx 3y ago
      There isn't really an equivalent of things like emacs text overlays and text properties in VScode, which makes it difficult to build complicated functionality in the main editor. You have to use a web view for most nontrivial things.
seanw444 3y ago
> The modal editing thing as some sort of mark of superiority or pride... is a bit of a recent obsession of a subset of nerd culture that I don't get, nor do I care to. I do agree that it's overblown. But I found the bindings more "sleek" for me personally. Vanilla Emacs keybinds seemed very odd to me, and was the biggest barrier to entry when I first looked at Emacs in high school. I appreciate projects like Doom that bring it all together in a neat and (more) intuitive package.

AlanYx 3y ago

Does anyone really script VScode in the same way as emacs? It's trivial to knock-off a little function in emacs to scratch an itch, but in VScode there's so much boilerplate to create an extension.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Yeah, I agree, and I don't personally use VSCode. But it sorta fills a similar niche, I guess. But it's missing the powerful buffer abstraction that makes emacs so special. An emacs buffer isn't just a text editor, it's an interactive working environment, a coding scratchpad, etc. closer to how old Smalltalk or Lisp environments worked. The same buffer concept can be simultaneously a terminal, a code editor, and a REPL.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > The same buffer concept can be simultaneously a terminal, a code editor, and a REPL. On the technical side, VS Code can do the same, and does it to some degree. I mean, it's a Web-browser in disguise, it can show anything you want. But overall there is indeed not much awareness for this and not many features and plugins supporting this. It simply has more order and control on this level. But I guess it's also just one plugin away on changing this.
  - AlanYx 3y ago
    There isn't really an equivalent of things like emacs text overlays and text properties in VScode, which makes it difficult to build complicated functionality in the main editor. You have to use a web view for most nontrivial things.

seanw444 3y ago

> The modal editing thing as some sort of mark of superiority or pride... is a bit of a recent obsession of a subset of nerd culture that I don't get, nor do I care to. I do agree that it's overblown. But I found the bindings more "sleek" for me personally. Vanilla Emacs keybinds seemed very odd to me, and was the biggest barrier to entry when I first looked at Emacs in high school. I appreciate projects like Doom that bring it all together in a neat and (more) intuitive package.