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VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

code.visualstudio.com

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Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#61

Post by achyudh »

mingus88 wrote: post #59
achyudh wrote: post #55

This pivot sounds like VS Code is moving from a text editor to a thin client for AI services that Microsoft wants to push. It is one more step towards a future where our development tools (just like everything else on our computers these days) are just thin clients/wrappers around SaaS. Emacs remains the antidote to this. I use Emacs because I want to remain the architect of my development environment, not become the…

My path in the emacs/vi divide forked a lifetime ago, and emacs is so fundamentally different that it was never worth sacrificing the massive productivity vim gives me to dip back into emacs But maybe that should change. I like vscode for when I need more IDE features than I care to cobble together with plugins. I don’t need another subscription in my life. Especially for anything I rely on.

I was more familiar with Vim bindings and relied on Vim emulation layers in various IDEs before I moved to Emacs. Evil mode and Doom made the jump possible without sacrificing too much productivity. With Evil, I didn't have to retrain my muscle memory and with Doom I didn't have to cobble together a functional config from scratch.

After a couple of months of using Doom, I felt comfortable enough to roll my own config which also helped me better understand how things worked at a lower level. More interestingly, after a couple of years, I transitioned from Evil to standard Emacs bindings as that felt better integrated with the rest of Emacs.

Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#62

Post by achyudh »

bobajeff wrote: post #32
f1shy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have to bet, I will absolutely go for MS enshitifying it beyond reasonable usability, in one way or another, more soon than later. Making an editor is anice endeavor. But there are plenty of, which are extremely well developed, open source, in many directions, emacs and vim the most prominent. But many others out there.

Emacs and Vim are terminal based though. So nice things like scroll bars, tabs, drag and drop etc. might be available as hacks but will disappoint in the ways in which they fail to work like a actual GUI interface. I'm also not a fan of model text editors. For open source GUI text editors there sadly aren't many that match the feature and polish of vscode.

While Emacs can run in a terminal, it is more widely used as a GUI application that can render images, PDFs, variable-pitch fonts, handle mouse support (drag-and-drop, menus, scrollbars), and even work on touchscreens such as on Android [1].

You are right that VS Code has a "nicer" out of the box UX (this is subjective of course), but Emacs offers a malleable environment. In VS Code, you are limited to what the APIs the developers decided to expose. If you want a specific behavior that isn't supported, you either fork the editor or create a feature request ticket and wait for someone to prioritize it. In Emacs, because you have full access to the internal runtime, you can implement that feature yourself in a couple of lines of Lisp.

1: https://kristofferbalintona.me/posts/202505291438/

Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#63

Post by imiric »

achyudh wrote: post #61
mingus88 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My path in the emacs/vi divide forked a lifetime ago, and emacs is so fundamentally different that it was never worth sacrificing the massive productivity vim gives me to dip back into emacs But maybe that should change. I like vscode for when I need more IDE features than I care to cobble together with plugins. I don’t need another subscription in my life. Especially for anything I rely on.

I was more familiar with Vim bindings and relied on Vim emulation layers in various IDEs before I moved to Emacs. Evil mode and Doom made the jump possible without sacrificing too much productivity. With Evil, I didn't have to retrain my muscle memory and with Doom I didn't have to cobble together a functional config from scratch. After a couple of months of using Doom, I felt comfortable enough to roll my own config…

My path was similar, except with Spacemacs, which has excellent Vim-like modal key bindings. I've been using a custom config for many years now, but evil-mode has been a crucial part of my setup. A modal interface is simply easier to use and more intuitive than twisting your fingers to hit complex key chords. I use Vi mode in shells, TUI programs, REPLs, anywhere Readline is supported, etc.

So Emacs+Vim is the best of both worlds. You get the infinite extensibility of Emacs and a sane(-ish) programming language, with the superior editing and command interface. The beauty of Emacs is that it really doesn't matter how you use it. For some modes you may need to override a keymap, or use a package like evil-collection, but most behave well OOB IME.

Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#65

Post by morkalork »

Mic92 wrote: post #54
foxrider wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, that would significantly lower the training data quality for any future models

It's ok actually. I have read some Windows code. Certainly better commented than Linux and certainly much more readable than glibc.

Wasn't a whole bunch of the NT source leaked ages ago?

Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#68

Post by tonyedgecombe »

morkalork wrote: post #65
Mic92 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ok actually. I have read some Windows code. Certainly better commented than Linux and certainly much more readable than glibc.

Wasn't a whole bunch of the NT source leaked ages ago?

You just need to look in the DDK (driver development kit) to see what it's like. Hungarian notation everywhere.

Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#69

Post by tehbeard »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #14

How is Sublime Text in 2024?

Jumped back to it to try seeing how functional it'd be as something more than than large logfile explorer.

Package control is still only in the command palette. If you want to explore what's on offer you have to do so on the actual package control site.

Managed to get LSP + intelephense installed so I have good PHP parsing (Other LSP providers appear to be available)... but stuck at the moment trying to get an intellisense analogue setup... Doesn't show up in package control in the program despite showing up on the site.

So right now I have syntax highlighting and errors flagged for a php file... but I don't have anything that can take the fact the class is missing several methods from the interfaces, and stub them out in a few keystrokes.

Re: VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

#70

Post by bobajeff »

achyudh wrote: post #62
bobajeff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs and Vim are terminal based though. So nice things like scroll bars, tabs, drag and drop etc. might be available as hacks but will disappoint in the ways in which they fail to work like a actual GUI interface. I'm also not a fan of model text editors. For open source GUI text editors there sadly aren't many that match the feature and polish of vscode.

While Emacs can run in a terminal, it is more widely used as a GUI application that can render images, PDFs, variable-pitch fonts, handle mouse support (drag-and-drop, menus, scrollbars), and even work on touchscreens such as on Android [1]. You are right that VS Code has a "nicer" out of the box UX (this is subjective of course), but Emacs offers a malleable environment. In VS Code, you are limited to what the APIs…

Thanks, it's been so very long since I've tried emacs. I remember I didn't like how it looked. So I used vim instead. (There was no vscode back then.) So I never did give it much of a try.

Emacs might be a solid editor choice but my intuition is that it probably won't be worth it for the same reason LiteXL wasn't for me. If I do work on adding features to my editor I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in js, html and css. And if possible I'd rather start with a base that's mostly where I want it to be. Trying to turn emacs into vscode sounds like way more of a project than turning Theia or CodeMirror into vscode.

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