Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#1

Post by gsaga » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 10:52 AM UTC

I would state up front that I'm a vim user and don't have much experience with either emacs or vs code. But as a product, both of them appear to be quite similar:

1. Programmable

2. Configurable

3. Can be used for programming in a variety of languages and frameworks

4. Bloated(?)

Hell, there's even an org mode plugin for vs code!

So, is it reasonable to view vs code (and atom?) as the successors of emacs, or as the emacs of modern day?

And if I'm thinking about jumping to something more feature rich than vim, should I jump to emacs or vs code(atom?)? I know that vim can be made feature rich with plugins, but you are lying to yourself if you say that vim can do anything an IDE can.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#2

Post by diimdeep » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 11:13 AM UTC

vim/emacs + ssh - editing directly over remote file system. I think this use case is why people keep using vim/emacs.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#3

Post by throwaway8879 » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 11:14 AM UTC

>But as a product, both of them appear to be quite similar

Not at all. Not even in the same league. Emacs is the Emacs of the 21st century. Vim is a text-editor and never claimed to be an IDE, so I don't understand the "lying to yourself" bit.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#4

Post by gsaga » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 11:54 AM UTC

throwaway8879 wrote: post #3

>But as a product, both of them appear to be quite similar Not at all. Not even in the same league. Emacs is the Emacs of the 21st century. Vim is a text-editor and never claimed to be an IDE, so I don't understand the "lying to yourself" bit.

Well some people claim that vim can do whatever an IDE can, which is just not true. That comment was directed towards those people.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#5

Post by hatsubai » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

gsaga wrote: post #4

throwaway8879 wrote: post #3

>But as a product, both of them appear to be quite similar Not at all. Not even in the same league. Emacs is the Emacs of the 21st century. Vim is a text-editor and never claimed to be an IDE, so I don't understand the "lying to yourself" bit.

Well some people claim that vim can do whatever an IDE can, which is just not true. That comment was directed towards those people.

I believe they're referring to the fact that vim + the OS itself (generally some flavor of *nix) can do whatever an IDE can do. From a terminal, one can call vim, gdb, valgrind, navigate file trees, utilize grep for searching codebases for a string, and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#6

Post by GeordiePowers » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

VSCode isn't anywhere near "open" enough (plugin APIs may be lacking). For example: the VSCode vim plugin is one of the worst of any major editor, while the Emacs version (Evil) is arguably the best implementation of vim period.

Atom is much closer to Emacs; nearly all the functionality is provided through optional packages, and it's very open to little tweaks to make it just the way you want.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#7

Post by tln » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

diimdeep wrote: post #2

vim/emacs + ssh - editing directly over remote file system. I think this use case is why people keep using vim/emacs.

There's an extension for that :)

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rafaelma...

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#8

Post by k-ian » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

lol

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#9

Post by ArtWomb » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

I use VS Code. Mostly for frontend stuff. It can bork on large files. Especially if they contain lots of inline binary data. And Intellisense works probabilistically across javascript dependencies. But generally positive the experience has been.

Tangential to IDEs are tools for data science and visualization. Having a shareable workspace, akin to Azure Notebooks, can be much more user (and scientist) friendly.

Another area where I think there is potential for innovation is branded cloud IDEs that actually understand cloud native development. Not just an editor, debugger, and console. But a single interface. Where you set load balancing, firewall rules, make data queries, analyze log traffic, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century?

#10

Post by snazz » Wed, Nov 07, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

GeordiePowers wrote: post #6

VSCode isn't anywhere near "open" enough (plugin APIs may be lacking). For example: the VSCode vim plugin is one of the worst of any major editor, while the Emacs version (Evil) is arguably the best implementation of vim period. Atom is much closer to Emacs; nearly all the functionality is provided through optional packages, and it's very open to little tweaks to make it just the way you want.

Agreed. I use Evil exclusively (effectively pretending that I’m using Vim, except that I get to use the awesome features that Emacs has for programming in Lispy languages) and would love to start learning Emacs proper, except that Evil is so good that I really don’t need to.

Atom feels sort of like Emacs except that you have to deal with JavaScript instead of Lisp. I prefer using Elisp over JS, and Emacs is much faster, and Emacs works without an X server, and Emacs has a better Vim mode. Until one of the Electron editors can compete, I’ll stick to Emacs with Evil.