[morgancmartin]

Personally, I agree that base Emacs is not ideal for most users. Ultra-customizers will feel out home, but the typical dev will not.

On the other hand, I am a huge proponent of Spacemacs. It's technically just a custom Emacs config, but it is a significant enough departure from the base functionality that it is managed as its own project.

It brings Vim keybindings (as well as an improved package management system and a bunch of other stuff) to Emacs in a very intuitive and seamless way. That way you get access to the very rich Emacs ecosystem, as well as the endless potential for customization, all with the, IMO, superior text editing experience of Vim.

I've tried VSCode, and it doesn't hold a candle to Spacemacs IMO.

I do occasionally envy some of the goodies the VSCode ecosystem benefits from, however. In particular the new Github Codespaces, for example. Still not enough to make me leave Spacemacs though.

[tharne]

I think this is the future of emacs -- distributions/configs. I'm doom emacs user, and I'm very happy with it. It's an easy and pleasant transition for vim users and it works well out of the box, while still giving you the option to customize it to your heart's desire.

There's no way that emacs will ever reach VS Code's level of popularity, but it doesn't need to. Desktop Linux, for instance, represents a teeny-tiny share of the desktop OS market, but it's a vibrant community (or communities, really) that's constantly improving the software and desktop linux user's will let you pry the OS from their cold dead hands. Not everything needs to have an 80% market share to succeed.