Ask HN: Is Visual Studio Code the Emacs of 21st century? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by ilovecaching » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

There's a big market gap between terminal text editors and GUI editors. For me, a GUI editor is a non-starter.

I do think that emacs, vim, visual studio code, et al. fall into the "not quite an IDE, but not just an editor" category.

Also through the power of LSP, vim can do anything an IDE or visual studio code can.

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

#32

Post by antoineMoPa » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

One of the nice thing about emacs is that I can use the GUI with all modern features and still have the same keybindings and features when working on a remote server/computer. Even if emacs was huge before I was born, it is very lightweight for today. Atom and VS code are built with electron, which makes them much slower and heavier on RAM. Visual Studio is like a proprietary notepad++ with a gigabyte per feature it has over notepad++ (C++ compiler, Python tools, etc.).

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

#33

Post by Ice_cream_suit » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 6:16 AM UTC

The Emacs of the 21st century is undoubtedly Emacs.

Emacs has modes for every cutting edge advanced research programming language imaginable.

I wanted to use some languages from the High Productivity Computing Systems project and found that Emacs was the only editor with support for Fortress https://github.com/stokito/fortress-langhttps://en.wikipedia... and Chapel (Cascade High Productivity Language) https://chapel-lang.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel_(programming_language)

Sadly, Visual Studio Code appears to be the Visual Basic of editors for the 21st century.ie: popular and easy to use, but used by a certain kind of developer...

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

#34

Post by arduinomancer » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 8:25 AM 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. Had to uninstall it as somehow it became so laggy to the point of there being a 3-5 second delay between typing and text showing up in the editor.

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

#35

Post by atmosx » Thu, Nov 08, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

40 years from now, you will still have emacs and vim packaged, ready to be installed or installed by default. Not sure if any other of today’s editors will be around.

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

#36

Post by zelly » Fri, Nov 09, 2018, 6:07 AM UTC

In 10 years, no one will remember VS Code. There will still be people using Emacs though.

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

#37

Post by auganov » Fri, Nov 09, 2018, 1:21 PM UTC

Emacs has been around for over 40 years now, VSCode and Atom for less than 5 I think. There are many great things about VSCode et al, things that Emacs doesn't have and likely won't anytime soon (mostly envious about the Blink rendering engine).

I've considered switching but I'm not convinced it'll still be the best in a few years. I could totally see someone making another web-tech based editor that has a more universalistic design like Emacs.

I'm still hoping somebody will fork Emacs and figure out how to bolt a nicer renderer, threading[0] and better GC onto it.

That said if you haven't already bought into any ecosystem I think VS is a great choice.

[0] this one is not realistic I guess but whatever