You can definitely accomplish something like this in VSCode and I would strongly encourage any student to explore customizing their own tools and workflow. The

You can definitely accomplish something like this in VSCode and I would strongly encourage any student to explore customizing their own tools and workflow. The main difference is that VSCode “extensions” (which in most respects are very much like emacs modes) are usually written in TypeScript rather than elisp. In fact there’s a guy called Steve Yegge who has blogged a bunch about an effort to make it possible to extend Emacs with JavaScript, so there’s lots of precedent for the analogy. If you decide you want to do this and need help getting started feel free to email me.