For example, you can't easily implement a shell which moves around the windows and can also sit on a side, because windows and sidebars are totally different concepts in the code.

VSCode depresses the hell out of me, it's almost a summary of the bad things of open source. Open source but most people will download it with spyware Open source but not really built as a nice platform to be meaningfully extended Open source and controlled by a single company Open source and used cynically as a wedge to pull developers into your orbit Open source and not at all written from an extensible mindset, just enough extensibility to trap people in Open source and will dominate other offerings because it has a big name behind it, so damages atom/emacs/etc Open source and pretty much an inferior copy of an existing thing (Atom)

Developers who are proud of using VSCode baffle me, have a word with yourselves.

> pretty much an inferior copy of an existing thing (Atom)

How? For starters, it's a lot faster which appears to be a major reason why people switch

> but not really built as a nice platform to be meaningfully extended

Well that's up for debate now isn't it? Its plugin ecosystem disagrees with a perceived lack of extensibility.

> used cynically as a wedge to pull developers into your orbit

How does VSC do that? I use it and I've never seen it advertise other Microsoft products or services to me.

> and controlled by a single company

Fork it.

You only disputed some of my points, "most people will download it with spyware", "it will damage existing more truly extensible efforts" seems to be a pretty key ones you haven't disputed. If only those two were true it would be enough for me to dislike it.

Regarding the spyware thing, agreed, but at the end of the day, the makers choose how they distribute the thing. It's just like Chrome and many other products.

I, for one, am thankful that they're making available a high quality tool for free.

Exactly. That's another program whose "open source" status frustrates and saddens me.

I was using Emacs when Textmate was the hot new thing. The Sublime came around. Then came the first Electron-powered editors like Atom and Brackets. Then came VSCode. While people kept chasing these new editors, I've been using Emacs for more than 10 years. I'll be still using Emacs when the hotter, newer thing eventually comes around.

I think a fully tooled-up Emacs setup in the hands of an experienced user is still faster and more powerful but I do wonder if Emacs will be able to develop fast enough to keep up with the cutting edge.

Additionally, it sparked the LSP a movement which is benefitial for all editors/IDEs, and we will see how much more will come from this. So even if VS Code itself will lost traction, it's heritage might prevail. But overall the specs so far look very healthy for a project in that realm, and chances are good that it will stay for a while.

What's VSCode's market share anyway? Is it really that big? I've never used it personally and I had no idea it was so popular.

The trends of the last few years are worrisome, though, particularly as regards the pool of developers who can work on Emacs core (the part written in C). Right now there's only one dev who's in a position to do non-trivial work on the display engine, and he also took on primary maintainer responsibilities a couple of years ago. When he burns out, the project is going to stall, hard.

Stefan Monnier, who was maintainer for most of the past decade, perceived this trend very clearly and was vocal in trying to recruit new talent. He didn't get much cooperation from other core devs.

At one point I tried using Emacs for everything but it didn't work out for me. Now I still use it but only for tasks management and coding.

Unless you want to spend hours of your time customizing it and then a lot of other person also does the same customization. This just ends up wasting a lot of time overall.

For me Emacs lacks the following and I think others will have the same feeling:

Obscure Terminology Documentation is all geeky with terms like frames, META, kill ring etc. This creates unnecessary friction for a new user. Basics of ELISP can be learned rather quickly but trying to apply it while grokking the tersely written documentation is just discouraging.

Sensible Defaults Simple things CTRL-C, CTRL-V does not work out of the box.

Mobile Interface It is an error not to provide a facility to interface with mobile devices natively. I get full Emacs can be invoked via termux on any Android device. However, it is just unusable and irritating. Orgazly and likes also not very useful.

Beyond that Emacs's docs are unparalleled in the editor world as far as I know, you can explore pretty much any functionality by calling "describe-key", "describe-mode" etc... Even decades later very few (if any) editor can rival the flexibility and self-documenting nature of Emacs.

Regarding key bindings I agree that it's definitely a pain point for newcommers, it's just too different from the modern standard (while not necessarily being better. C-_ for undo? I got used to it but it's hard to defend). Unfortunately making a complete new set of bindings that would play nice with 3rd party packages is probably very difficult.

Those people are not going to live forever so if Emacs wants to have fresh blood inducted then a gradual modernization would not hurt. I think even Richard Stallman agrees[1] to some of it.

> Beyond that Emacs's docs are unparalleled in the editor world as far as I know, ....

I agree Emacs have documentation for almost everything but I disagree on the quality of documentation. For example when I pull out a documentation Most of the documentation describes what the argument should be which is anyways clear by looking at the argument list. It would be much better to include an example instead of describing the arguments verbatim.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg00...

I can see a situation where 0 users switch to VSCode and in a few years it still has, say, 80% of market share, just by getting all the new ones.

Part of it can be attributed to growth. If the population of programmers grows by 100% every 5 years (an estimate I remember reading somewhere), then at any given time, half of the workforce has at most 5 years of experience. This explains why our industry seems to be so full of "js-first" developers - because in fact, it is.

...Obligatory mention of Xi editor: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor ...

I am not saying that VS Code is everyone's answer and choice but VS Code is resource friendly enough. Who cares about the resource difference between EMACS and VS Code in real world practicality? I know people love to bash anything electron but it really isn't anything to worry about when programing with anything that is 6 years old or newer.

VS Code is immediate and responsive on my Dell at work (10 years old) (I refuse to give it up even though I have several more computers but everyone needs a spare computer) what do we need besides that in terms of resource-efficient now a days? I know that it use to be a big deal and I propose that its a non-factor these days.

I literally use different apps on battery vs wall power:

wall: Firefox, Slack, VSCode

battery: Safari, mail, Emacs

The difference is clear as night & day. Mac OS X has a tab in Activity Monitor where you can observe energy impact of different apps, and it consistently reports Electron apps as... psychotic. An order of magnitude (10x) more intensive than their native counterparts.