My thoughts about editors in 2020

They are huge and slow and take a while to learn.

But is the alternative really all that better? I love vim, but without a bunch of plugins it's fairly rough to use. VSCode seems the same. So to me it looks like you're trading one complexity (learning about your tool) for another (having to search left and right for the right plugins, see how they work, etc).

Software dev is not my day job, although I do it often enough to have a PyCharm license. I've purchased that because working with Django just works. It knows how to refactor, it understands the meanings of strings in configurations, it can run a local editor with local analysis / completion / etc but do the actual code running / debugging on a remote machine. All this out of the box and very easily set up. Can VSCode do this? I don't know, maybe. But I know that it doesn't have python support out of the box. So instead of having to search through the settings of PyCharm (which, to me, have fairly sane defaults) I have to search through the plugins of VSCode.

I'm also trying Rust a bit. There's a JetBrains plugin for it, it just works. It was fairly bare bones, now it's getting smarter and smarter with respect to refactoring, etc. Last I looked in VS Code, there were multiple rust plugins. Which should I pick? I get that choice is good, don't get me wrong. My point is that using a "simple" editor isn't all that simple either. It's always a trade off of sorts.

Now, if your point is that all you need is vim with a nice color scheme, I understand that, too. And in that case, you've got a point. But I guess that, as GP said, if there are tools available that are there to help you, some people like using them.

Oh, nothing like 'cat | base64' , copy, paste in another terminal to cat

extremely useful in locked down environments

I just wanted to note for the author, if they’re here, that VSCode has a newish plugin called neovim I think that actually uses neovim itself to handle movement and editing, so it should work no matter how odd the config.

I currently use VSCode and Doom Emacs, after being a fairly long time vim user, fwiw.

During the period of about 10 years that I was using Emacs as my main editor, I invested countless hours in mastering Elisp, configuring this and that, writing custom functions, fixing abandoned minor modes that I still found useful... It was literally all over the place.

At some point, the list of things that were broken/didn't work well for me got quite long, and I became dissatisfied enough to stop what I was doing and start going through various elisp packages, trying to understand what was really happening.

Let me say first, that I really admire and respect the potential of Lisp. When the code is well written, it is elegant, reasonably comprehensible, and malleable. However, when the code gets sloppy or unnecessary levels of abstraction are added to 'just make things work', it quickly becomes inscrutable. I kept running into package after package of this kind of poorly written, inscrutable Elisp. One package was using EIEIO (object-oriented Elisp) and there were excess levels of indirection all over the place, across thousands of lines of code.

Org-tables are pretty neat, but ultimately a fancy gimmick. I had a 7 column table, and after 200 rows, the reformatting became ridiculously slow. After looking through the tens of thousands of lines of org-mode Elisp code, my main question was, "Is all this code really necessary?" I know that org-mode does a lot, but Elisp is a dynamically typed scripting-level language. With macros. What went wrong?

Things look quite different in biostatistics research and adjacent fields. I personally use vscode, nano, and rstudio. But I am still mostly wetlab. People in my research group use some combination of these, maybe atom, and I am sure some of them like vim or emacs, but I haven't asked. The python guy uses vscode instead of intelliJ. I haven't seen anyone use vscode over RStudio, for R. But some of us will occasionally preference R intepreter in the terminal.