IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

I do wonder who the target audience is. Sure, this is a nice tryout if you are a VSCoder and want to try emacs. This essentially comes down to new users of emacs and trying to replicate it like another editor. Sounds you are skipping the basics of emacs training.

Perhaps I am wrong, here?

At the end of the day - it's just an .emacs file with the appropriate packages. I would recommend learning those packages individually, allowing you the freedom to express emacs that suits you. If there is something you still like with editors or IDEs like VSCode, you can adapt it.

Emacs is a customisation program!

I have been a C# developer for nearly 20 years (and an emacs user for about the same)

I have been using emacs for practically all languages except for C# with Visual Studio (IDE). However, as the years passed.. have slowly moved over to emacs. By the time .NET Core was introduced (I think VSCode was around this time, also) I realised that I have most if not all tools I need to do some serious .NET work in Emacs. -- Today.. I pretty much use emacs with odd exceptions.

My emacs is very simple. I have my lsp-mode (csharp-ls) as well as the usual magit, yasnippet, etc. With a nice dark theme, I have all I need to navigate about my project/solution. It's funny... when my co-workers see me with emacs they just assume I am "trying to be different" for the sake of it. However, when they watch me.. and without the use of a mouse.. they soon understand why I use it.

I have also added additional functions to create solutions, projects, building, deployments.. all visible from a custom screen.

Yeah, it so totally fair to hear it from a Haskellite, I'm so convinced now... /s

"I have a job to get done, and my job isn't learning category theory, monads, type families, fighting compiler's cryptic messages and pragmas. I don't have any particular affinity for FP. I truly do not - in fact, I have even less affinity for it now that I've wasted so much time making Haskell do basic I/O and fighting the type system for my purposes..."

Even though the take like this maybe viewed as the honest one since Haskell's learning curve is genuinely brutal for practical work, I personally would never say that. I don't use Haskell, but I never regret time I spent trying to conquer it.

You can pretty much assert similar comments as yours about just any tool if you use it without proper understanding of the ideas behind it:

Python: my job isn't screwing around with virtual environments, dependency shit, and pretty useless type hints...

Java: my job ain't wrestling with Spring Boot config files, Maven POMs, and classpath issues...

C++: my job isn't learning the difference between stack/heap allocation, smart pointers, and move semantics...

Rust: my job isn't fighting the borrow checker and lifetime annotations...

Let's be honest, it seems you're mad at Emacs on an emotional level, rather than from educated, pragmatic stance. I admit, over the course of my career path I have felt similarly about different hard-to-learn things, I was like: "I feel like a sucker for not mastering this thing. Other people seem to make it sing. I wasted time and gave up. Now I need to feel like it was the tool's fault, not mine."

Eventually, I learned ways to distill great ideas and borrow them from different tools. I may not use a specific concrete implementation of a given tool daily, yet I find some of the abstract principles behind it appealing.

You have no idea how instrumental Emacs is for my everyday job-to-get-done tasks. It makes me sad to hear you failed to find the same dynamics even after spending a good amount of energy on it. When you're looking for a gray cat in a dark room and there is no cat, you'll spend a lot of time looking. And when you learn that it wasn't about a cat at all, you may end up hating all the cats. Attempting to use Emacs without understanding Lisp is like trying to cook in a dark kitchen. But programmers who dismiss Lisp entirely, are like musicians who refuse to learn music theory because they can play by ear. It's just sad to watch their talent getting lost in unnecessary limitations they've imposed on themselves. It like a talented musician who could understand harmony, composition, structure - but chooses not to. So they plateau. They hit a ceiling where ear alone can't take them further. And devs dismissing Lisp? They might have skills, but they're voluntarily blind to a way of thinking that could deepen their craft.

You say like it's some kind of feature, but for me it sounds like a potential for name clash, and using private API which is prone to change/break.

> You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing

The thing is that is was VSCode which has brought us LSP, not "emacs hackers". It was VSCode which has brought us LLM Agent mode. All editors are catching up to VSCode, not the other way around.

LSP, LLM, ssh/docker/podman remote development, what's the Emacs answer to those? (I mean, nowadays vim+emacs have their own LSP clients built-in, years after VSCode)