The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
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The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
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Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#2A thoughtful essay. I find myself frustrated with Sublime Text these days, and as a former (novice) vim user, I’ve been debating if I should go for VSCode like all the young guns these days or commit to Doom Emacs to leverage a solid initial setup and my vim memory and fully embrace libre route, which are a little more aligned with my values (although not to the degree of RMS). I remain oddly indecisive.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#3The Neovim section participates in the popular sports of ganging up on top developers who have spent decades of their life in the public interest, for free.
The Neovim developer is called its "author", which is poor form and probably a copyright violation. Go and write your own editor from scratch.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#4I don’t find VS Code to be a good text editor in the sense of a tool to wrangle text: the keyboard shortcuts are rather arbitrary and don’t seem to be logically organised, and it seems not to have learnt much from eg modern text editors like Sublime Text (even Sublime compatibility isn’t as good as the real thing).
That said, for writing code, it’s fine because most of the time I’m thinking and typing in short runs of text.
I’d love for it to receive a bit of love so it’s a better at wrangling text out-of-the-box, however.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#5> It also shines in areas where Emacs doesn’t: if you’re a programmer working on typical contemporary projects, mostly just wanting to get stuff done, things usually… just work. You install VSCode, open a source code file, get asked to install the extension for that particular language, and that’s it. You get smart completion, static analysis, linting, advanced debugging, refactoring tools, deep integration with git, and on top of that, great performance and a cohesive user experience.
These days I mostly use VSCode due to great language server integration (Pylance, gopls, rust-analyzer, etc.), but I still rely on Emacs with Magit for almost all my git interactions. This is not helped by VSCode's shitty commit message box, which after five years is still this ~250x20px by default input field with some after-the-fact validation tossed in. The great thing about Emacs is that everything is a buffer, you get the full editing power afforded by a buffer, not some second-class input field, especially for something as important as commit messages.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#6The Neovim section participates in the popular sports of ganging up on top developers who have spent decades of their life in the public interest, for free. The Neovim developer is called its "author", which is poor form and probably a copyright violation. Go and write your own editor from scratch.
The only place that the developer of neovim is referred to as its “author” is in a quote. But also, I didn’t get this impression at all while reading the article.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#7For some reason the real-estate on vscode like file browser etc is really small compared to any other tool, on vs code I always have to move scrolls to see anything, I think this is the main thing why I don't use it while I really want to.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#8A thoughtful essay. I find myself frustrated with Sublime Text these days, and as a former (novice) vim user, I’ve been debating if I should go for VSCode like all the young guns these days or commit to Doom Emacs to leverage a solid initial setup and my vim memory and fully embrace libre route, which are a little more aligned with my values (although not to the degree of RMS). I remain oddly indecisive.
I use VSCode with a vim plugin. I’m mostly happy with it. As opposed to Vim, VSCode makes it easy to setup as a general purpose IDE. The downside is that it doesn’t feel as responsive (it’s not terrible, but noticeable) and has a larger memory footprint.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#9This is really well written and researched but confuses me. Do most people not do this - make choices based on values (and constantly re-evaluate those choices in the face of new information)?
When I decide to use software, move to a new location, purchase cereal at the grocery store, buy music, and a variety of other daily activities, these are choices I make based on my values. Many times I end up picking something that I find slightly less convenient or usable because it aligns with my values better, and I'm unwilling to compromise my ethical stance for a little bit of convenience.
It seems unrealistic to me that people would choose otherwise, given enough information.
Re: The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
#10This is really well written and researched but confuses me. Do most people not do this - make choices based on values (and constantly re-evaluate those choices in the face of new information)? When I decide to use software, move to a new location, purchase cereal at the grocery store, buy music, and a variety of other daily activities, these are choices I make based on my values. Many times I end up picking something…
Most people's moral values don't concern text editors, or software in general.