IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

Sure, I know about C-h b and C-h m and find those useful. But I think what the GP post describes is more contextual: A way to not display every keybinding, but only those directly accessible by pressing the currently held modifier combo followed by one key (so holding Ctrl+Meta for more than a couple of seconds might remind you of all structural editing commands for example).

This is indeed not possible in a classical terminal emulator (don’t know if kkp for example has extensions for it). But most GUI apps can detect individual modifiers being pressed and released, even as separate events. Some editors like VSCode can also bind modifier taps to actions using this ability. In Emacs however this is AFAIK not possible even in the GUI, because of how keybindings are handled deep down.

The UI pattern described by the GP does exist in some other apps and platforms. For example, if you connect an external keyboard to an iPad, holding down the Cmd modifier for a couple of seconds will show you a popup which-key-like overview of all Cmd+key keybindings.

It doesn’t really look the same by default.

Most new users end up disabling the toolbar, menu bar, scroll bars, etc. and only then does it look the same in the terminal. Even then, many themes and packages frivolously change font sizes or switch to non-monospace fonts in some GUI contexts, so for users that like the uniformity of the interface you need to do extra work to disable these features.

(I personally like the terminal aesthetic, and configure the GUI to look like a terminal. That basically required advising load-theme to loop over all faces and disable font properties I don’t like after each theme change…)

> Personaly i never get used to the UI of VSCode. seems so hard to understand because in emacs you deal with functions not UI buttons.

I prefer both Vim and Emacs over VSCode, but I teach intro programming at a university and use VSCode in the lectures.

VSCode is actually quite decent if you use it as a keyboard-driven thing with a distraction-free interface. By the former, I mean that Cmd-Shift-P does the same as Emacs’ M-x, and from the keybinding hints you quickly learn any recurring useful bindings (or can change them under Cmd-K Cmd-S when they feel bad). By the latter, I mean that nearly every UI element can be disabled (activity bar, tab bar, status bar, scroll bar, most buttons, indent guides, gutters, etc.) and if you spend 30min disabling the fluff it looks as minimal as Emacs. You don’t really need the UI elements if you learn Cmd-Shift-P and basic keybindings, which as an Emacs user you’ll pick up in a week.

Not trying to sell VSCode here, as I said I don’t prefer it myself. I really tried to switch some times, but I don’t like the Microsoft monoculture nor the importance of proprietary plugins (like remote development and pylance), and an Electron app usually has some weirdness when it comes to font rendering, UI bugs, etc. compared to native or terminal apps.

But if you have to use it, it’s actually not bad if you approach it in the same way you’d approach Emacs: Call functions with Cmd-Shift-P (can rebind to M-x if you want), and invoke more common functions via keybindings instead of UI elements.

VSCode users, especially new ones, do. The best property of Emacs is that you can modify the lisp machine to do whatever you want.

As a 15+ years emacs user the only item on my wishlist is client-server remote editing mode similar to that of vs code. Then I can go back to using emacs on cloud VMs. Does anyone know a solution to this that works as good as VS Code even when your latency is high? Hopefully, I will be pissed off with all the weird configuration flags of VS Code enough to write one myself ;-) To be fair its python integration is quite good at least for the usual stuff.