6 ms·

For me, VSCode implements everything that I've always expected from Emacs/Vim. I've spent years to configure emacs/vim to be a good programming editor. Years,

For me, VSCode implements everything that I've always expected from Emacs/Vim. I've spent years to configure emacs/vim to be a good programming editor. Years, multiple configurations, vanilla configs, space/doom emacs configs, multiple predefined configs for vim/neovim. Something always was broken, something was missing, something was non-optimal just below the tolerance line. Missing features, discontinued packages, initialization errors, bad versions, "known issues", LSPs not starting, packages replaced by some newer shinier package with different usage, cryptic setups that are wrapped in "convenience layers" that obscure details, making it completely incomprehensible. Then VSCode came and it had everything. Remote development is trivial through ssh. Completion simply works without any setups. Massive number of languages supported. It's a mess inside, but the UX is more stable and more consistent than anything I've ever seen in emacs/vim. Sometimes something breaks, but I can restart the window backend without closing the app easily. This is really telling. Despite dedicating years to configure an "infinitely configurable" system, I wasn't able to achieve anything stable. I've given up and i just use VSCode daily. This way, I have more than I ever had with emacs/vim. The only thing I have from vim that's left is the keyboard layout. For this, I'm thankful to Vim, but the editor itself for me is just for editing config files. I don't even have Emacs installed anymore.

roman_soldier 11mo ago
This, most people that try and use these legacy editors spend most of their time configuring it get it to be as good as vs code and usually fail. A lot of wasted time and frustration when one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work. I do use vim for quick editing of files in the terminal but never for serious work.
- omnicognate 11mo ago
  Not sure where you get "most" from. Personally I've found the exact opposite: Despite having been forced by work constraints to use most major IDE platforms at one point or another, sometimes for years at a time, I always come back to emacs with great relief and find it better in pretty much every way. I know better than to assume my experience is that of "most" people, though.
  - roman_soldier 11mo ago
    The data shows VS Code is used by double digit % of developers, whereas Emacs is less than 1%, I think that qualifies for most.
    - iLemming 11mo ago
      That's not the point - McDonald's has 40000 joints - the most popular restaurant in the world. Still doesn't make it the best food option. Yes, Emacs is not popular, but if you look deeper, you may find unsurprisingly that most Emacs coders are strong developers. That correlation isn't coincidental - you don't stick with Emacs unless you're willing to learn; it effectively teaches you about Lisp, extensibility, and programming in general. Yet, they are not talking about general popularity of editors among devs, but about people who ever tried Emacs - the argument is that the majority of them try, fail and abandon it. For which obviously there's no polemical (or otherwise) data points.
  - self_awareness 11mo ago
    I've installed emacs now on ArchLinux Wayland system and its window refuses to resize (on purely default settings), and freezes the contents until I move it. Very refreshing indeed. I bet this is some kind of a known issue, but that just reinforces my original point above. edit: yeah, here it is: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871 I mean, how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?
    - iLemming 11mo ago
      > I've installed emacs now on I never had what you describe. The variability there could be almost random - which version of Emacs you're installing? How are you installing it? Are you trying to build it from source? What renderer are you using - there are several: Lucid, Motif, GTK, NS, W32, Haiku, Android, Cairo, Pgtk. Perhaps it's installing different renderer instead of using pgtk. Maybe it's not a bug with Emacs but with the package that bundles it for your distro? > how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs? It does seem to be an Emacs issue. But it is a specific issue that happens on the combination of your hardware and your OS configuration.
- iLemming 11mo ago
  > one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work I use over 300 hundred packages in my Emacs setup. I honestly not sure if I can install even half of that number of VSCode extensions and expect it to still run smoothly, maybe people do that, I just don't know. They are called "packages" and not "extensions" for a reason - an extension that e.g., ships with a browser has limitations. In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another - in VSCode they have to be explicitly exposed via public API, must be activated in order, they need to be aware of their extension IDs, there's no discovery mechanism - in Elisp, I don't have to deal with any of that. in Emacs I can explore, modify and bend the source code of any package - built-in or third-party. I can do it in a way that is simply impossible anywhere else. I can granularly change selected behavior of any command without having to rewrite it fully. That "just works™" part I don't ever buy it - all software is faulty by nature. In Emacs, when something fails - I know exactly how to troubleshoot it, to the specific line in the specific package code; I can profile; debug and trace it. I can modify code in question in a scratch buffer and immediately check how it affects things. Not only I don't have to restart anything, I don't even have to save that code anywhere. You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing - for what the most "modern" alternatives simply have no answers. I agree, Emacs is not for the faint-hearted - many people (maybe most) lack the patience required to grok it. Yet make no mistake, those who have tamed this beast are not staying in it simply because "they don't know any better". They know - something better is yet to be made, if ever. VSCode is great, yet still not better. Learning Emacs has liberated me from experiencing tool-FOMO ever again - I can switch to VSCode without abandoning Emacs, and I can even probably figure a way to control one from another if I get annoyed enough; I just never found a pragmatic reason to use VSCode more. So really, I have zero envy or crave to even become a full-time VSCode user; if anything, I might be forced into it by circumstances, but that's a different story.
  - self_awareness 11mo ago
    > In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another You say like it's some kind of feature, but for me it sounds like a potential for name clash, and using private API which is prone to change/break. > You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing The thing is that is was VSCode which has brought us LSP, not "emacs hackers". It was VSCode which has brought us LLM Agent mode. All editors are catching up to VSCode, not the other way around. LSP, LLM, ssh/docker/podman remote development, what's the Emacs answer to those? (I mean, nowadays vim+emacs have their own LSP clients built-in, years after VSCode)
iLemming 11mo ago
> For me, VSCode implements everything that I've always expected from Emacs/Vim. Good. For me, VSCode unlikely will ever become anything that I expect from my text editor. For coding, sure, Emacs may not be great for any specific language except some Lisps, but for plain text manipulation, OMG, Emacs still is the king. I just can't see it ever replacing it for note-taking - just yesterday I was showing someone "reproducible research" workflow example in Org-mode where I had a source block that sends http requests, then passes that into a bash block where the results get converted to EDN, then connected it to a Clojure REPL, explored and visualized data in it. Name one system that allows you to seamlessly pipe results of one computational block into another, mixing different languages. Today I made a table with some formulas to calculate some numbers. Does your note-taking app has spreadsheets-capable tables and embedded math formulas? Two weeks ago I was dealing with a slew of logs coming from k8s pod, and I want it to explore it in my editor - I piped from terminal directly into an Emacs buffer. I can similarly pipe the content of any given buffer into a different unix command. I control video playback directly from Emacs - it's very nice when I'm taking notes. My pdf documents blend-in into my color theme, which btw. changes based on time of day automatically - Emacs has a built-in solar and lunar calendars. I search through my browser history and through open tabs directly from Emacs - it's great for finding and grabbing specific piece of text from the browser - so I can put it into my notes. I rarely need to open Jira in my browser, Emacs understands that "XYZ-12345" is a ticket and shows the ticket description in a tooltip, I can browse its content in-place, same is for RFCs. My Emacs understands that a url is a PR and allows me to review it in-place. It knows when it's looking at a GitHub repo url and allows me to clone it with a keypress, or explore CircleCI logs. I never type anything longer than three words in any app. I've built a workflow that allows me to quickly move the text into my editor and back into the app. Why would I do it differently? I have all the tools I need - thesaurus, spellchecker, translation, etymology lookup, LLMs, etc. Finally, once I got the plain text under control, I realized that code is nothing but structured text. I have things like fetching the path to exact line on GitHub, while supplementing the fully-qualified name of the function - my colleagues don't have to guess what they're staring at, they can simply see it without ever opening the link.
- self_awareness 11mo ago
  OKAY. I'll install it again. I hope you're happy. Having a text based Jira frontend seems attractive. (I've actually written myself a cmdline tool that uses Jira API so I don't need to visit the website)

roman_soldier 11mo ago

This, most people that try and use these legacy editors spend most of their time configuring it get it to be as good as vs code and usually fail. A lot of wasted time and frustration when one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work. I do use vim for quick editing of files in the terminal but never for serious work.

omnicognate 11mo ago
Not sure where you get "most" from. Personally I've found the exact opposite: Despite having been forced by work constraints to use most major IDE platforms at one point or another, sometimes for years at a time, I always come back to emacs with great relief and find it better in pretty much every way. I know better than to assume my experience is that of "most" people, though.
- roman_soldier 11mo ago
  The data shows VS Code is used by double digit % of developers, whereas Emacs is less than 1%, I think that qualifies for most.
  - iLemming 11mo ago
    That's not the point - McDonald's has 40000 joints - the most popular restaurant in the world. Still doesn't make it the best food option. Yes, Emacs is not popular, but if you look deeper, you may find unsurprisingly that most Emacs coders are strong developers. That correlation isn't coincidental - you don't stick with Emacs unless you're willing to learn; it effectively teaches you about Lisp, extensibility, and programming in general. Yet, they are not talking about general popularity of editors among devs, but about people who ever tried Emacs - the argument is that the majority of them try, fail and abandon it. For which obviously there's no polemical (or otherwise) data points.
- self_awareness 11mo ago
  I've installed emacs now on ArchLinux Wayland system and its window refuses to resize (on purely default settings), and freezes the contents until I move it. Very refreshing indeed. I bet this is some kind of a known issue, but that just reinforces my original point above. edit: yeah, here it is: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871 I mean, how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?
  - iLemming 11mo ago
    > I've installed emacs now on I never had what you describe. The variability there could be almost random - which version of Emacs you're installing? How are you installing it? Are you trying to build it from source? What renderer are you using - there are several: Lucid, Motif, GTK, NS, W32, Haiku, Android, Cairo, Pgtk. Perhaps it's installing different renderer instead of using pgtk. Maybe it's not a bug with Emacs but with the package that bundles it for your distro? > how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs? It does seem to be an Emacs issue. But it is a specific issue that happens on the combination of your hardware and your OS configuration.
iLemming 11mo ago
> one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work I use over 300 hundred packages in my Emacs setup. I honestly not sure if I can install even half of that number of VSCode extensions and expect it to still run smoothly, maybe people do that, I just don't know. They are called "packages" and not "extensions" for a reason - an extension that e.g., ships with a browser has limitations. In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another - in VSCode they have to be explicitly exposed via public API, must be activated in order, they need to be aware of their extension IDs, there's no discovery mechanism - in Elisp, I don't have to deal with any of that. in Emacs I can explore, modify and bend the source code of any package - built-in or third-party. I can do it in a way that is simply impossible anywhere else. I can granularly change selected behavior of any command without having to rewrite it fully. That "just works™" part I don't ever buy it - all software is faulty by nature. In Emacs, when something fails - I know exactly how to troubleshoot it, to the specific line in the specific package code; I can profile; debug and trace it. I can modify code in question in a scratch buffer and immediately check how it affects things. Not only I don't have to restart anything, I don't even have to save that code anywhere. You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing - for what the most "modern" alternatives simply have no answers. I agree, Emacs is not for the faint-hearted - many people (maybe most) lack the patience required to grok it. Yet make no mistake, those who have tamed this beast are not staying in it simply because "they don't know any better". They know - something better is yet to be made, if ever. VSCode is great, yet still not better. Learning Emacs has liberated me from experiencing tool-FOMO ever again - I can switch to VSCode without abandoning Emacs, and I can even probably figure a way to control one from another if I get annoyed enough; I just never found a pragmatic reason to use VSCode more. So really, I have zero envy or crave to even become a full-time VSCode user; if anything, I might be forced into it by circumstances, but that's a different story.
- self_awareness 11mo ago
  > In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another You say like it's some kind of feature, but for me it sounds like a potential for name clash, and using private API which is prone to change/break. > You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing The thing is that is was VSCode which has brought us LSP, not "emacs hackers". It was VSCode which has brought us LLM Agent mode. All editors are catching up to VSCode, not the other way around. LSP, LLM, ssh/docker/podman remote development, what's the Emacs answer to those? (I mean, nowadays vim+emacs have their own LSP clients built-in, years after VSCode)

iLemming 11mo ago

> For me, VSCode implements everything that I've always expected from Emacs/Vim. Good. For me, VSCode unlikely will ever become anything that I expect from my text editor. For coding, sure, Emacs may not be great for any specific language except some Lisps, but for plain text manipulation, OMG, Emacs still is the king. I just can't see it ever replacing it for note-taking - just yesterday I was showing someone "reproducible research" workflow example in Org-mode where I had a source block that sends http requests, then passes that into a bash block where the results get converted to EDN, then connected it to a Clojure REPL, explored and visualized data in it. Name one system that allows you to seamlessly pipe results of one computational block into another, mixing different languages. Today I made a table with some formulas to calculate some numbers. Does your note-taking app has spreadsheets-capable tables and embedded math formulas? Two weeks ago I was dealing with a slew of logs coming from k8s pod, and I want it to explore it in my editor - I piped from terminal directly into an Emacs buffer. I can similarly pipe the content of any given buffer into a different unix command. I control video playback directly from Emacs - it's very nice when I'm taking notes. My pdf documents blend-in into my color theme, which btw. changes based on time of day automatically - Emacs has a built-in solar and lunar calendars. I search through my browser history and through open tabs directly from Emacs - it's great for finding and grabbing specific piece of text from the browser - so I can put it into my notes. I rarely need to open Jira in my browser, Emacs understands that "XYZ-12345" is a ticket and shows the ticket description in a tooltip, I can browse its content in-place, same is for RFCs. My Emacs understands that a url is a PR and allows me to review it in-place. It knows when it's looking at a GitHub repo url and allows me to clone it with a keypress, or explore CircleCI logs. I never type anything longer than three words in any app. I've built a workflow that allows me to quickly move the text into my editor and back into the app. Why would I do it differently? I have all the tools I need - thesaurus, spellchecker, translation, etymology lookup, LLMs, etc. Finally, once I got the plain text under control, I realized that code is nothing but structured text. I have things like fetching the path to exact line on GitHub, while supplementing the fully-qualified name of the function - my colleagues don't have to guess what they're staring at, they can simply see it without ever opening the link.

self_awareness 11mo ago
OKAY. I'll install it again. I hope you're happy. Having a text based Jira frontend seems attractive. (I've actually written myself a cmdline tool that uses Jira API so I don't need to visit the website)