(personal bias: i've been using emacs for about 20 years, though I don't know elisp and I have very mildly customized dotfiles)
I want to process and respond to this question, but I can't get past:
> It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM)...
Consider that you must be doing something deeply wrong? I have a broadwell (2015) i7, 2 cores, 16GB of ram (8 of which is reserved), and Emacs is quite fast.
I tried to use VSCode once, around when it came out. It was a pathetic joke. Once you manage to stop laughing at the concept of using an editor, hosted in a webbrowser, written in javascript, you were able to enjoy exactly the performance you would expect from such an "application".
I couldn't type more than a few lines before the high latency, and the fact that I could feel my CPU heating up, gave me all the info I needed.
What's VSCode for?? I don't do much (any) UI work, so I'd believe you if that's its strength, but.. an editor????
I doubt it!
Having noticeable latency between keystrokes and requiring huge amounts of system resources make it kinda ... hard to take seriously.
> Once you manage to stop laughing at the concept of using an editor, hosted in a webbrowser
Webbrowsers are designed, as it's main function, to display text. Makes sense to me to use something that can render text in all sorts of different ways *as a text editor.*
I've tried to use Emacs several times, and come away thinking that it does a lot of things, but none of them particularly well. Elisp seems fine I suppose, but JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages and so it's sensible to use that as a basis for an ide whereby more people have the existing knowledge to hack away with it.
Keep in mind I said "when it came out". I don't know when that was, and maybe it's improved. A bit. That being said, the fact that VS Code isn't a native application, but something run as a local web app, is all the info you need. (no idea how it's gonna grab the keybindings it's gonna need if it's in a web browser... and the fact that it burns CPU on blinking the cursor isn't exactly a sign of Quality Engineering)
I would consider that, if it made sense to do so. But, my coding environments are pretty bare bones, there's not a lot of things to "do" wrong.
That being said, if I can do so in under a few minutes, I'll install VSCode right now and see if it runs... And if VSCode seems fast on your machine, you should check out emacs! ;)
As a fellow emacs user, I have to say that you're wrong and the "non-native apps are trash" attitude isn't super productive.
I do mostly backend development in a few languages, all using emacs, but will bust out VS Code when I need to browse a web codebase for whatever reason. It's a very performant application. It can grab all the keybinds it needs and my install with a handful of addons doesn't burn CPU doing nothing and is just as snappy as emacs.
Happy to discuss the pros of emacs but your cons list for VS Code is in part wildly outdated and in part flat out untrue.
> your cons list for VS Code is in part wildly outdated and in part flat out untrue.
What's untrue about it?
Not disagreeing with you, just am not in a position to test it myself (yet). I JUST managed to get VS Code installed, and am trying to run it for the first time, as I type this...
> ... bust out VS Code when I need to browse a web codebase for whatever reason.
Makes sense. I'll just go ahead and believe you on this, because I don't know what a "web codebase" is, how it might differ from a normal one, and hence benefit from whatever specialized tooling VS Code has for that. Does "web codebase" mean any interactive webapp, with HTML, JS, CSS, and some language or UI framework combined? I wouldn't be surprised if VS Code is superior out of the box for those sorts of things, if it's designed for them.
> It's a very performant application. It can grab all the keybinds it needs and my install with a handful of addons doesn't burn CPU doing nothing and is just as snappy as emacs.
We'll find out won't we! I now have VSCode running for a comparison. "just as snappy" is far from true, but I admit, it's far more responsive than when I tried it before. Possibly even usable.
I like the seamless integration of extensions! The need to "pick a folder" just to open and compile a single file seems a bit unnecessary, but a small annoyance. But I stand corrected, this is not nearly as bad as I expected. Once I can make it use emacs key bindings, and tweak it enough to have less "policy requirements" it might be worth a peek.
> And if VSCode seems fast on your machine, you should check out emacs! ;)
I did, I rely heavily on code completion, hinting, linting, marking unused variables, lighting big red light when I made type error... you get the point. And I have two conclusions. First is that setting all up how i like it was a pain, I finally had to use Doom Emacs as a boilerplate (kudos for hlissner, I believe this is best Emacs hope for new users), and it made it bearable, but whole setup felt really slow when UI had to take second or two before showing my precious type error.
Now, I really believe you when you are saying that i could make it faster. It's just that I would have to put evenings just to be basically in the same place.
Additionally, I would replace the most popular editor with one that has an almost negligible share of the "market".
The "it burns CPU on blinking the cursor" argument doesn't appeal to me at all, because it's not like the computer is unresponsive because that cursor is blinking, or even noticeably slower. I have to spend dozens of hours learning and configuring emacs to make parameters I don't notice improve?
For the most part emacs is also not native: most of emacs is written in elisp, which only got a compiler very recently and it is very likely still nowhere as good as as the V8 jit.
I understand that as most electron applications VSCode was very slow and bloated initially, but these days people say is quite snappy (I wouldn't know, I never used it).
I want to process and respond to this question, but I can't get past:
> It's slow (I have i7 with 4 cores and 32Gb of RAM)...
Consider that you must be doing something deeply wrong? I have a broadwell (2015) i7, 2 cores, 16GB of ram (8 of which is reserved), and Emacs is quite fast.
I tried to use VSCode once, around when it came out. It was a pathetic joke. Once you manage to stop laughing at the concept of using an editor, hosted in a webbrowser, written in javascript, you were able to enjoy exactly the performance you would expect from such an "application".
I couldn't type more than a few lines before the high latency, and the fact that I could feel my CPU heating up, gave me all the info I needed.
What's VSCode for?? I don't do much (any) UI work, so I'd believe you if that's its strength, but.. an editor???? I doubt it!
Having noticeable latency between keystrokes and requiring huge amounts of system resources make it kinda ... hard to take seriously.