The huge advantage of VSC: plugins can use HTML to implement whatever UI they want, from a workflow tool, to a test tool, to a Git graph view to a debugger data structure visualizer. And all that in widely-known to tons of people HTML/CSS.

Never understood why other editors, like ST, didn't give more UI options (checkboxes, buttons, dropdowns, a canvas, etc) to plugin authors. Consider how clunky a lot of plugin interactions with limited UI widgets available to them are.

But even if other editors started giving more freedom to design your plugin with more widgets etc, they could never beat the freedom HTML/CSS gives.

The second huge advantage of VSC: Microsoft behind it updating it non-stop. TextMate stalled, ST seems abandoned for long stretches of time (and it's not like we "already solved code-editing, what more you want") because of lack of manpower, etc.

The third advantage of VSC: first-class support for plugins, with "package manager" and storage built-in: plugin discovery, install, uninstall, enable/disable, configure, are all a click away. ST has this too, but not as refined as VSC, but more like a tacked-on text-based experience.

Two more advantages of VSC:

- remote development tools (MS). Code in your laptop, run/debug in SSH/Docker/WSL environment.

- automatically saved/synced preferences. This came in in this release.

I'm not in favor of Electron apps over native. But VSC is really that good.

The last two are more of disadvantages; The remote setup eats a lot of memory from the remote machine, and needs an excellent internet connection, and can't integrate with local editing (You have to use two separate windows, and it's in general nowhere as neat as tramp). The saved prefs are synced without version control, which means you can't really count on them.

It is the only Electron app that I tolerate willingly, but hoping that eventually React Native team at Microsoft will manage to drive a transition, somehow.

I remain utterly perplexed by the popularity of VS Code, to me it basically does nothing well, but does a bunch of things mediocrely.

I was an avid emacs user for almost a decade and it only 2 a week with VSCode for me to jump ship completely.

The issue I had with Emacs is that while could get it to do anything, often it took a lot of time. I would often end up spending an entire afternoon or Sunday tinkering with my config to get set up to develop in a new language. Whe I adopted VSCode it took about 20 minutes - install a plug in, set some config. I had a better setup for Elixir in a text editor I had never used before in minutes, after having spend hours achieving an inferior result in Emacs.

The reason for this basically comes down to abstraction levels in a couple of places.

Language support in VSCode is at the 'plugin' level whereas in emacs you usually have to assemble several pieces. Partly this is achievable because VSCode made their own life easy pushing the hard work of language support out using the language protocol. Its widespread adoption in a relatively short time is a great benefit to everyone (emacs included).

I get that, but VS code plugins are generally mediocre at best. If I want a “install plugin and it works” editor, I use IntelliJ, which does a better job at basically everything.

I'm curious as to which plugins you have used to have that impression. My plugin experience with VS Code has been generally great. Far better than any Jetbrains product I've used, I dare say.

It’s surprisingly easy to grind performance to a halt in VSCode using the extensions (even on a modern machine of course) much like using a browser with extensions (but worse).

That said the only reason I use VSCode instead of Vin is when I program in Typescript because the support is outstanding, always cutting edge, and super easy to set up. Code is ideal for frontend js programming in general with lower investment.

Similar to how awesome Emacs was for Clojure and Lisps in general.

But nothing will peel me away from (neo)Vim for generally everything else. I love how fast, portable, and perfectly customized I’ve made it over the years.

The difference with vim vs emacs vs VSCode is probably like the value with the community size and plug-in support. Just like programming languages become great through having great libraries and frameworks and tutorials etc, being popular has tons of value. After simply being good at all the foundational stuff.

> It’s surprisingly easy to grind performance to a halt in VSCode using the extensions (even on a modern machine of course) much like using a browser with extensions (but worse).

The same is true for emacs, or vim or any other extendable editor. Poor code behaves bad everywhere.

But the real surprise is, VS Code usual performance is equal or better than emacs even with an average setup which is still a tad more powerful than whatever emacs offers on a good setup.

A product doesn’t need to be excellent to be popular. Take for example McDonald’s or Burger King. You will not get excellence there. But you will consistently get a filling meal to a quite good price. Or take TV-series. They don’t need to be excellent either to get lots of viewers. They just need to be available and entertaining.

(I don’t mean this as a critique of VSCode. I have never used it.)

Yeah but VS Code is considered by many to also be best in class.

I find that assertion utterly perplexing.

I mean, to each their own. Someone else using an editor I dislike doesn’t harm me in any way. But if someone told me that VS Code was “best in class” for anything other than a language I have never touched and have no knowledge of, I’d look at them like they’d just asserted that the sky is green.

To each their own :)

well, the same can be said of Swiss martial cutlery...

To connect this a bit back to emacs, I think the big contribution VSC has made is to popularize the language-server concept, which decouples the UI from the automagical autocomplete and context-sensitive documentation we expect from IDEs.

Emacs's lsp-mode and (I'm told, not yet tried) eglot make it possible to use emacs to productively write java, something I won't attempt without tooling support.

The LSP interface, like slime, enables a whole class of interaction, rather than re-implementing the language support for each languge, like in days of yore.

That truly is a modern coding practice, brought to emacs.

As avid Electron hater and someone that found refuge in XEmacs, back when IDEs and UNIX did not mix, it is a matter of defaults and not everyone likes ELisp.

Sure, but it’s not like the choice is between Emacs and VS Code alone. I for one find IntelliJ to be far superior to VS Code for the languages I use. Especially since search and autocomplete actually work, which it doesn’t do in VS Code.

VSCode has the power of free beer, and most major plugins are done by Microsoft, Red-Hat, Google and friends, while most InteliJ goodies are available online on the commercial license.

I wonder how many devs are motivated by that. All of the ones I know are already using OSX, so standing on principle for just the IDE would be incoherent.

OS X is about 10% of the world desktop market.

Hardly seen outside first world countries, and even on Europe it isn't easily spot outside the rich EU countries.

I did a couple of consulting gigs where the only iMac available for the Dev teams was used in turns for iOS deployments, for applications done in cross platform frameworks, where 90% of development time was spent in Ubuntu and Windows based computers.

VS Code is pretty much the proof that a modern Interface and beginner-friendly customization is the secret of success even for editors. Of course only additional to a solid foundation in terms of ability.