Ask HN: Have you gone from Editor A to Editor B and then back to Editor A? Why?

I keep trying VSCode out and being drawn back to Emacs. It's happened several times. Most recently I forswore Emacs for several weeks to use VSCode and IDEs instead.

Now I'm back on Emacs.

Part of the problem is, Emacs does so many things right. It does electric indent right. It does bracket matching right. It does visiting a new file right. And VSCode gets them wrong, but so do most editors. The thing that drove me to quit VSCode altogether was the fact that when you use File / Open in VSCode, it clobbers the ENTIRE editor state in that window -- terminal, output, and all.

Maybe this behavior can be changed via a configuration setting. I don't know. But the fact that some smoothbrain at Microsoft decided that this should be the default, that opening a file with the menu should start a new editor session and clobber your old (unless you had the forethought to spawn a new window first) tells me a lot about how much the VSCode team do not grok the ergonomics of how developers work in the real world.

So back to Emacs, whose UI is not "modern" but is nevertheless timeless, because it's been shaped by the experience of decades of the world's best hackers doing real work in it.

I did something slightly different. In the early days of computing, using CP/M, I found WordStar and used it happily for years.

When the IBM-PC came out, there was a version of WordStar for that so I continued using it. Later on, I used Linux which has a 'joe' editor which has an alter-ego called 'jstar'.

Yep. 'jstar' is a WordStar clone, and that's what I still use now, 35 years after I first found WordStar. I even renamed it to 'ws'.