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Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
41–50 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#42A Unix novice came to Master Foo and said: “I am confused. Is it not the Unix way that every program should concentrate on one thing and do it well?” Master Foo nodded. The novice continued: “Isn't it also the Unix way that the wheel should not be reinvented?” Master Foo nodded again. “Why, then, are there several tools with similar capabilities in text processing: sed, awk and Perl? With which one can I best practic…
Missing the point, but imagine learning perl, sed and awk (and requiring everyone else to know all three) when you could just use Perl to do everything.
perl -pie 's/foo/bar/'
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#43> But are there any other reasons, technical or otherwise, why people don't seem to use VSCode for things beyond editing code? The best answer I've seen to this question is https://www.murilopereira.com/the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim... Amongst other things, it lists different values that each tool prioritizes, and how "Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them." Ema…
Hey, thanks for the link, it was a really nice read!
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#44Of course. VS Code is just a Chrome browser with a bunch of scripts bundled.
Where scripts includes anything you can compile to wasm. That enables a lot of interesting stuff. Including, say, compiling some lisp to wasm to e.g. retrofit some emacs stuff via a vs code extension. Probably a bit redundant but it would not surprise me to see some code sharing long term between the two ecosystems via wasm.
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#45Try using VSCode in terminal mode when you're logged into a remote machine via SSH and see how well that goes.
> It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM)
Something is wrong here. I can't remember the exact specs of the machine when I first started using it but it might have been as low as a 486 with 1 core and 32Mb of RAM.
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#46A Unix novice came to Master Foo and said: “I am confused. Is it not the Unix way that every program should concentrate on one thing and do it well?” Master Foo nodded. The novice continued: “Isn't it also the Unix way that the wheel should not be reinvented?” Master Foo nodded again. “Why, then, are there several tools with similar capabilities in text processing: sed, awk and Perl? With which one can I best practic…
"Everything is a file" Unix is an OS for I/O streams / lines. That's what it's good at. That's what the tools are designed for.
And that's how they spectacularly fail when something does not fit into that paradigm. Like file name with `\n`. Apparently now you need `\0`-separated lines and all the tools need `-0` or `-z` switches, console does not print it well and all that card house breaks apart.
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#47(personal bias: i've been using emacs for about 20 years, though I don't know elisp and I have very mildly customized dotfiles)
I want to process and respond to this question, but I can't get past:
> It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM)...
Consider that you must be doing something deeply wrong? I have a broadwell (2015) i7, 2 cores, 16GB of ram (8 of which is reserved), and Emacs is quite fast.
I tried to use VSCode once, around when it came out. It was a pathetic joke. Once you manage to stop laughing at the concept of using an editor, hosted in a webbrowser, written in javascript, you were able to enjoy exactly the performance you would expect from such an "application".
I couldn't type more than a few lines before the high latency, and the fact that I could feel my CPU heating up, gave me all the info I needed.
What's VSCode for?? I don't do much (any) UI work, so I'd believe you if that's its strength, but.. an editor???? I doubt it!
Having noticeable latency between keystrokes and requiring huge amounts of system resources make it kinda ... hard to take seriously.
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#48Try using VSCode in terminal mode when you're logged into a remote machine via SSH and see how well that goes. > It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM) Something is wrong here. I can't remember the exact specs of the machine when I first started using it but it might have been as low as a 486 with 1 core and 32Mb of RAM.
That's because Emacs is web scale.
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#49> But are there any other reasons, technical or otherwise, why people don't seem to use VSCode for things beyond editing code? The best answer I've seen to this question is https://www.murilopereira.com/the-values-of-emacs-the-neovim... Amongst other things, it lists different values that each tool prioritizes, and how "Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them." Ema…
> Velocity
Hmm not so sure about that. The main reason that I have not complete switched over to VS Code, is that it feel klunky and I'm using a 16GB macbook pro, not top of the line, but something where I should expect a code editor would feel not so klunky.
Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?
#50Try using VSCode in terminal mode when you're logged into a remote machine via SSH and see how well that goes. > It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM) Something is wrong here. I can't remember the exact specs of the machine when I first started using it but it might have been as low as a 486 with 1 core and 32Mb of RAM.
Yeah, the first machine I started using Emacs on was similarly spec'd, and it's only gotten faster since....