Comment by Cthulhu_
1 year ago
TBH, no criticism on the developers, but the VS Code release notes haven't been interesting or relevant to how I used the editor for years. I think I checked out when they added a terminal client to it and it dominated the release notes for ages.
AI features is one of the bigger innovations in editors in years, I fully understand the enthusiasm, especially given it can be linked to an earnings model. That said, before AI stuff I would've expected them to push integration with Github and Azure more.
This is why I use Emacs and it's why I didn't stop using Emacs when Sublime Text II, then Atom, then VSCode became popular.
When Microsoft gets bored of VSCode or forces you to only do AI "vibe coding", Emacs will still be there.
New version just came out. The release notes were full of good things.
Well, I used Emacs for 15-20 years. It has problems of its own -- mostly that it is effectively locked into an antediluvian view of how editors work, and that to use it effectively you end up maintaining large and complex configuration files.
I still use it for some things, but what we really need is a new, different edition of Emacs that has the same basic architecture but a more modern take on all the stuff that dates from the 1980s.
It's not "a problem," it's a difference in philosophy. Sure, VSCode comes accessible out of the box with minimal configuration needed and a GUI-first settings interface. But that comes with its own price - your config is more restricted in what you can do and fragmented across json files, settings menus, and extension options.
In contrast, with Emacs I can change any behavior of any function and command - built-in or third-party with amazing granularity. I can change specific parts of a function without rewriting it, and I don't even need to save that - I can just write a piece of Elisp in a scratch buffer, evaluate it, and test it out immediately.
Also, you are completely wrong with your notion that Emacs is outdated. Modern Emacs tools allow you to do things in a way no other editors let you - you can control video playback, read and annotate PDFs, search through your browser history, and automate things with LLMs.
Not to mention that the problem similar to the one being discussed in the thread would never happen in the Emacs world - nobody would ever get to publish a package with obfuscated Elisp code in it. You always will have full control over the code you download to use.
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XEmacs Tried to do that, it has been attempted to rewrite the backend of emacs into Rust twice, Guile has tried to interpret emacs lisp twice. The biggest problem is basically how large the user base is and the ability of people to want to perform the port so actually improving the editor is more likely.
GTK+ and webkit has been integrated into emacs and it has a package manager now and configuration is still a problem.