[pronik]

Whoever thinks that VSCode does not have any learning curve or is somehow magically easy, needs to take a reality check, that thing is overwhelming with all its popups, hovers, sidebars etc. beyond all reason when you first run it (and later too). I'm an Emacs user and I don't in any way support the notion it's somehow easy or intuitively workable, it's most definitely not and never has been. I just think that VSCode is not it either, it's just the more popular tool right now.

[skydhash]

VSCode is familiar in its UX. Here is the file tree, here is the editor. oh that's the terminal, or I can complete with tab, and these are extensions that I can install? And that's pretty much the extent of the interaction most people have with it. If it does not come out of the box or prepackaged into an easily extensible extension, they are not using it.

[iLemming]

> VSCode is familiar in its UX

That's by design. It must have appealing looks and employ every trick from psychology books to get you to try it and keep using it.

You don't have to be a genius to realize that a for-profit corporation with a $3 trillion market cap, spending millions on building a code editor with no direct licensing model; that they are distributing for "free" is not some kind of unseen goodwill; That shit eventually will generate billions in downstream Azure/services revenue. What is it if not a trivial ROI? It is a "loss leader" in traditional business terms, but a strategic necessity for cloud/services dominance.

VSCode is essentially a Trojan horse for the Microsoft developer services ecosystem - a mental prison that is designed to be easy to get in but hard to escape.

In comparison - vim/emacs have not a single profit motive; their network effect works differently; Yes, there's no entity with trillion dollar market cap to keep the pace with vscode, but no deprecation risks, no corporate pivot that ever is a treat to lock-in your data or your workflow or compatibility with older hardware. Vim & Emacs win by not being a loss leader for anything.

Who can ever predict what happens 5–10–20 years from now? Who can guarantee that some evil CEO wouldn't replace Nadella and secretly start implementing changes in the strategy that would change the essence and the meaning of being a programmer? It is already assumed that every dev has to use GitHub and to know VSCode at least on some basic level today. What if tomorrow your employers would be able to analyze your telemetry data to "measure" your performance? What if the use of anything but VSCode as the code editor would simply be banned?

[nsonha]

Does not take any coding ability configue it. Out of the box you can search for any setting and even if you edit the json config directly you get autocomplete.

[kace91]

Every piece of software that’s effectively a professional workbench (IDEs, DAWs, video editing, etc) is going to have some complexity.

I can’t imagine the argument that vscode’s level of complexity is even in the same order of magnitude as vim or eMacs though. A 2 minute tutorial or half an hour or fiddling will get you sorted with vscode, I needed a full ebook for neovim.

[skydhash]

VSCode rely on familiar pattern and UX to let you get started easily. But out of the box, it's pretty much notepad level. Vim and Emacs start from the premises that you need powerful tools. And they give them to you alongside the possibility to integrate external tools easily with the editor workflow. With VSCode any integration needs to be a full project. With emacs and vims, it's a few lines of config.

[pxc]

I'm also a daily Emacs user. I'm no wizard; I've leaned on starter kits like Spacemacs and Doom my whole Emacs life.

Likewise, I find VSCode overstimulating and, for lack of a better word, rude.

I just tried setting up RustRover for a side project at work on Friday. It's my first time using an IDE since I was a Scala developer near the beginning of my professional career. I only had an hour or two to play, but I ended up unable to get a working run configuration, or at least one that showed me anything at all except sometimes when it failed. It was a lot of clicking around.

I'll sort it out next week, I'm sure. But pointy-clicky turned out not to be as ez-pz as I'd hoped it would be.

[t_mahmood]

IntelliJ shines when you use the command pallet, keyboard shortcuts, and IdeaVIM

Double shift, to bring up the pallet, and start typing. Though it also have a ton of shortcuts, and shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command.

Try this: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x/

Whenever you don't use keyboard shortcut for any action, this suggests you the available keyboard shortcut.

[frumplestlatz]

I’ve been using emacs for very many years, and have a configuration that has evolved over a decade.

I was able to pick up VSCode in an hour. It’s not complicated. I’m using it with the Haskell extension and it’s great.

Honestly, I’m tired of Emacs’ performance, bugs, complexity, and poor UI that requires an enormous amount of hacking to make a usable IDE.

VSCode is a breath of fresh air. The only things I’m not using it for are languages that don’t have extensions yet — Cryptol and SAW.

[iLemming]

> requires an enormous amount of hacking to make a usable IDE.

When you're using it for one, specific purpose, like an IDE for specific language(s), then yes, sure, it may feel like that.

Yet Emacs is so much more. It's not an IDE (but it could be); it's not [the best] source control tool; it's not [greatest] note taking app; it's not an [amazing] mail client; it's not [most beautiful] pdf reader; nor a [feature rich] terminal app; etc. Emacs is not even an editor, to be brutally honest. It's not the greatest concrete implementation of any of these things.

What Emacs actually is - it's a concrete implementation of an abstract idea - a Lisp REPL with a baked-in text editor into it. That, for a second, is an absolutely fascinating commodity. Once you grok the essence of that idea, it's really difficult not to see the extreme value of it.

I'm sorry, I just have hard time to believe anyone who says: "used it for many years... yet abandoned it anyway".

It typically means that they've been using it from a narrow, small focused point of view, without ever exploring the possibilities that "true" Lisp REPL can grant them. I just don't see myself ever escaping Emacs, because there's simply no practical, comparable alternatives to it. Comparing VSCode to Emacs is like comparing it to Thunderbird - you didn't like how Emacs handled your emails and now using something else? Congrats, and that's just fine, only it's not fair and proper comparison by any means.

[jrm4]

Here's the thing (as someone who did Emacs for a year and then gave it up)

The possibility and ease of interoperability with other general program styles is far more important that the idea is given.

Look, there are too many other good tools out there that do things like have a standard file picker, use CUA bindings etc. This is primarily why I left Emacs for non programmy things (and am happier with a hacked zim-wiki, though I imagine obsidian et al might work too)

[cholantesh]

>that thing is overwhelming with all its popups, hovers, sidebars etc.

I think it's fairly normal if you're coming from heavy IDE use, eg: Eclipse. If you've spent most of your time editing using tmux/[vi|nano|emacs]], maybe that's not the case, but I can't really speak to that as I've never really worked that way.

[totetsu]

I get so frustrated watching people fuss around in VSCode because they're stuck in it and they've never had the opportunity to see all the intuitive and more workable tools that a.. just part of the basic OS they are using. .. like keeping their console a tab taking up 1/4 the screen and trying to read a stack-trace ..

[solumunus]

If you struggle with VS Code you must struggle with everything.