TL;DR: Why isn't VSCode the new Emacs?

VSCode is clearly a code editor. Emacs is used by many as an operating system / UI framework / app platform.

Emacs's adepts have been using it for email, calendars, process management, taking notes, terminal GUI, coding (dah), and some even browse the web without leaving it.

I've been using Orgmode (+ org-roam) for a couple of years already and no other software can replace it for me.

I have huge respect for this almost 40 years old piece of technology and all the people keeping it alive and active. I love the hacker community around it.

All that said, I mostly hate using Emacs. It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM). Emacs Lisp drives me crazy. I constantly mis-press some weird key chord and enter a state where I can't do anything unless I restart the app. It's hard for me to find docs on how to integrate with various parts of the UI, so I mostly rely on reading the source code of different extensions. Two years in, I still can't read Emacs Lisp well.

I feel unproductive when changing how Emacs behaves. And I've been coding for 7+ years, including functional programming.

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Now, I've been using VSCode for quite a while (after 4 years of Vim).

I've noticed that, on the surface, VSCode extensions can do everything Emacs does.

If you think about it, VSCode is a UI framework too — there's an API for all the UI components such as the sidebar or the text editor area itself; and you can also add your custom commands that can be triggered in a number of ways.

Which means you can actually implement things like Orgmode in VSCode.

Also: - You are coding using the most popular ecosystem in the world (Web). - The community is larger than one of Emacs. - The docs are much friendlier.

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From what I understand, the main difference is that with Emacs you can start hacking any part of the environment right from the start. It's designed to be played with.

With VSCode, you just have a strictly defined JSON config file, and everything else requires you to work with "extensions" which sounds like something less accessible and "oh, that sounds grand, I'm not sure how deep that rabbit hole is". You can't just open a file, define a new hook or whatever and now your VSCode behaves differently.

But are there any other reasons, technical or otherwise, why people don't seem to use VSCode for things beyond editing code?

If only you could open some special file, write some Typescript, and modify anything about VSCode in a dirty hacker manner, would you use it?

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user:	u-rate
created:	October 17, 2021
karma:	37