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Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

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Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#71

Post by loxias »

ccakes wrote: post #61
loxias wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take that bet! Keep in mind I said "when it came out". I don't know when that was, and maybe it's improved. A bit. That being said, the fact that VS Code isn't a native application, but something run as a local web app, is all the info you need. (no idea how it's gonna grab the keybindings it's gonna need if it's in a web browser... and the fact that it burns CPU on blinking the cursor isn't exactly a sign of Qu…

As a fellow emacs user, I have to say that you're wrong and the "non-native apps are trash" attitude isn't super productive. I do mostly backend development in a few languages, all using emacs, but will bust out VS Code when I need to browse a web codebase for whatever reason. It's a very performant application. It can grab all the keybinds it needs and my install with a handful of addons doesn't burn CPU doing nothi…

> your cons list for VS Code is in part wildly outdated and in part flat out untrue.

What's untrue about it?

Not disagreeing with you, just am not in a position to test it myself (yet). I JUST managed to get VS Code installed, and am trying to run it for the first time, as I type this...

> ... bust out VS Code when I need to browse a web codebase for whatever reason.

Makes sense. I'll just go ahead and believe you on this, because I don't know what a "web codebase" is, how it might differ from a normal one, and hence benefit from whatever specialized tooling VS Code has for that. Does "web codebase" mean any interactive webapp, with HTML, JS, CSS, and some language or UI framework combined? I wouldn't be surprised if VS Code is superior out of the box for those sorts of things, if it's designed for them.

> It's a very performant application. It can grab all the keybinds it needs and my install with a handful of addons doesn't burn CPU doing nothing and is just as snappy as emacs.

We'll find out won't we! I now have VSCode running for a comparison. "just as snappy" is far from true, but I admit, it's far more responsive than when I tried it before. Possibly even usable.

I like the seamless integration of extensions! The need to "pick a folder" just to open and compile a single file seems a bit unnecessary, but a small annoyance. But I stand corrected, this is not nearly as bad as I expected. Once I can make it use emacs key bindings, and tweak it enough to have less "policy requirements" it might be worth a peek.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#72

Post by yaantc »

kangaroopouch wrote: post #59
spacemanmatt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out with VSCode hoping it would be an easier, more modern Emacs. Calva was the closest thing to a good experience I could get. Now I am switching to Emacs for CIDER and generally the Emacs ecosystem. I doubt I'll ever not use vim when I'm working/thinking in systems mode, though. The thought of waiting for a "real" editor to launch when I just want to edit a tiny unstructured file is a sad one to me.

If you're interested in a reliably-quick-to-start editor, and prefer the Emacs ecosystem, consider https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/ . It's built for that purpose.

I used to use a light editor for quick edits, jed, but now I use Emacs too. It turns out that Emacs in text mode without a full configuration (so: "emacs -Q -nw") starts nearly instantly on a few years old laptop, so I just aliased jed to this command. It's about ~110ms for start+exit, good enough for me. And all of Emacs is there, even my init if needed.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#73

Post by kamaal »

peterkelly wrote: post #45

Try 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.

>>Try using VSCode in terminal mode when you're logged into a remote machine via SSH and see how well that goes.

On the other had vscode is the best experience I've had editing files remotely. Unlike emacs where you have install and configure tramp. The experience in vscode was seamless. In fact the Python vscode plugin is clever enough to understand you are opening a remote python project. It will ensure the local venv is set up with all your tooling(flake, black etc)

None of this possible with Emacs.

Emacs gives a good editing experience. But we have moved one from coding being merely a text typing excercise.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#74

Post by rvdginste »

orionblastar wrote: post #27

I'd rather see Visual Studio 2022 for Linux than VSCode. The closest to that is Monodevelop https://www.monodevelop.com/

JetBrains Rider is a perfectly fine IDE that works on Linux. Way better and way more powerful than VSCode and Monodevelop. And in my opinion also better than Visual Studio (though I didn't try 2019 and 2022, Rider does everything I need).

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#75

Post by kamaal »

loxias wrote: post #62
spacemanmatt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out with VSCode hoping it would be an easier, more modern Emacs. Calva was the closest thing to a good experience I could get. Now I am switching to Emacs for CIDER and generally the Emacs ecosystem. I doubt I'll ever not use vim when I'm working/thinking in systems mode, though. The thought of waiting for a "real" editor to launch when I just want to edit a tiny unstructured file is a sad one to me.

> The thought of waiting for a "real" editor to launch when I just want to edit a tiny unstructured file is a sad one to me. Amen to that. That's why I use emacs. ;) Just timed it myself, started and ready to go in 120ms. Pretty sure we can shave more time off that.

>>Just timed it myself, started and ready to go in 120ms.

Let me get this straight. You plan to code for hours, and your biggest concern at this point in time is your editor takes 1 - 2 seconds more to start?

A second is 1.666666666667% of a minute. And 0.02777777777% of an hour. Just how much more productive are you getting by saving this time?

On the other hand emacs is notorious for making users spend days to get a decent working set up. And even that's more like bad vscode clone than anything else.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#76

Post by CodeGlitch »

loxias wrote: post #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…

> Once you manage to stop laughing at the concept of using an editor, hosted in a webbrowser

Webbrowsers are designed, as it's main function, to display text. Makes sense to me to use something that can render text in all sorts of different ways *as a text editor.*

I've tried to use Emacs several times, and come away thinking that it does a lot of things, but none of them particularly well. Elisp seems fine I suppose, but JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages and so it's sensible to use that as a basis for an ide whereby more people have the existing knowledge to hack away with it.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#77

Post by havkd »

loxias wrote: post #56
havkd wrote: post #20

I’ve wanted to switch to emacs for a long time, but it feels like a second or third class citizen on Windows. There are many guides online on how to prepare it to be used as an IDE for different programming languages but it all breaks down when you try to follow the guides on Windows. On the other hand vscode is first class, or almost.

What's wrong with using the official/native emacs binaries on Windows? My knowledge is at least a decade out of date, but the official build: http://mirror.rit.edu/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-27/emacs-27.2-... Seemed to work well. The key is to get a shortcut to emacs in your SendTo menu :)

It works well, but online tutorials have instructions that don’t necessarily work on Windows. Some of the most popular plugins (or whatever you call them in Emacs) don’t work well on Windows either.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#78

Post by sebazzz »

jbverschoor wrote: post #55
vbezhenar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. It's a nice abstraction, but for many things an object-graph / object-stream makes more sense. The output / rendering can be a tree or a table.

Which is the reason I love PowerShell.

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#79

Post by riezebos »

mih wrote: post #18

Does VSCode offer a terminal user interface? With Emacs/Vim I can SSH to a remote machine and immediately start editing with muscle memory using the same keystrokes as in the GUI. Sure VSCode has its strengths and as an IDE easier to get started and work with, especially for newcomers. That said, the fact that it requires a desktop environment to operate in means there are niches that Emacs fills which VSCode current…

> Does VSCode offer a terminal user interface?

No

Can VSCode be used to SSH to a remote machine and immediately start editing with muscle memory using the same keystrokes as in the GUI?

Yes: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

Re: Ask HN: Could VSCode be the new Emacs?

#80

Post by rvieira »

After using Vim, VSCode and IDEs for many years, only recently have I tried to get seriously into Emacs. I use it for everything nowadays (from organisation to coding) with the exception of some very large Java projects where IntelliJ is definitely the best option for me.

org-mode was my "gateway". I always wanted to learn Lisp, so I guess that was a plus too (I'm aware Elisp is not the best way to learn it).

I don't know if VSCode will be the new Emacs but I doubt it. It will be, and already is, hugely more popular, and I'm glad it is. I believe in people having a good choice of open source tools and using whatever they feel better using.

What I like about Emacs is that you are given vanilla editor and you have to make it "your own". Now some people like this, some people hate this. Some people like to quickly download a VSCode extension and just get on with it.

I also like how Emacs' "things" can have a synergy. I just recently setup my blog to be written in org with Jupyter-like code examples, pre-processing and exporting. This involves a few packages but they worked together nicely, It's all text after all.

I don't know how to do that in VSCode (parsing using an extension, processing the result using another, exporting with yet another, etc). Perhaps it's simple, but I guess that if you are doing this, then between VSCode and Emacs, they both require a reasonable amount of work.

Regarding speed I'm using Emacs 28 native and I feel it's a massive improvement.

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