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0 pointsznpy11mo ago0 comments

Emacs user here, have used vscode in the past.

Yep, vscode is more intuitive.

However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of discomfort and enjoy for the rest of your life. Quite literally.

Spending some money on the “mastering emacs” book (https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is worth imho.

Bonus point: little by little you start enjoying doing more stuff in emacs. It’s a meme, but it’s true.

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kstrauser11mo ago

I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation.

And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.

lysace11mo ago

I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense.

MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.

It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.

datadrivenangel11mo ago

What are the ways that VScode is better than Emacs?

baq11mo ago

vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).

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lysace11mo ago

I listed my favorites above.

Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.

rurban11mo ago

And with copilot.el you get access to all models, not just some. I'm using Claude

pjmlp11mo ago

I dedicated my time between 1995 and 2005 as my main UNIX editor, and don't miss installing Emacs.

kstrauser11mo ago

It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.

pjmlp11mo ago

Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.

I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.

Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk

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cess1111mo ago

I'm something of a vim fanatic because Emacs was sluggish, but these days have to admit that the multicore support turned out fine and the difference isn't that big anymore.

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kstrauser11mo ago

And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.

lysace11mo ago

MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.

It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.

datadrivenangel11mo ago

What are the ways that VScode is better than Emacs?

baq11mo ago

1 more reply

lysace11mo ago

I listed my favorites above.

Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.

rurban11mo ago

And with copilot.el you get access to all models, not just some. I'm using Claude

pjmlp11mo ago

I dedicated my time between 1995 and 2005 as my main UNIX editor, and don't miss installing Emacs.

kstrauser11mo ago

It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.

pjmlp11mo ago

Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.

I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.

Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk

1 more reply

cess1111mo ago

I'm something of a vim fanatic because Emacs was sluggish, but these days have to admit that the multicore support turned out fine and the difference isn't that big anymore.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse