I also think the sibling comment is right; TextMate never had the huge collection of plugins later editors did, but you can very much see the seeds of Sublime Text's package system in it, and Sublime is a very obvious influence on Atom/Code. (Although they were smart to have package management fully integrated; Sublime's package management system is a bit clunky by comparison.)

You can also customize Atom easier than VsCode. Why even build on web technologies if you don't let your users change things. For instance you have to have an extension to custom load CSS and it's kind of a hassle. Heck even Sublime has an easier interface to change the text editor in real time. You don't really need to do much as it already looks good though.

fwiw I use Linux and suspect that's a big part of why Macs never appealed to me.

IntelliJ IDEs feel similar — sometimes I’ll open them up and after upgrading several plugins and dismissing a bunch of popups and “what’s new” dialogs, I don’t even remember what I was trying to do in the first place.

Let me introduce you to Emacs, vim, Sublime, TextMate, ...

Unlike VSCode, Emacs and Vim have a learning curve. And turning them into full blown IDEs makes their usage even more complex.

> Sublime

Sadly, Sublime is sort of dead.

> TextMate

TextMate: Text editor for macOS

Sublime has ongoing development on https://www.sublimetext.com/dev and the last major release (4) was just about a year ago.

I'm still rocking SLT 3, and it's my go-to for large file handling or just as a simple scratchpad, but development (of SLT) feels like it moves at a snails pace.

Everything works just the same, and I don't get the purchase pop-ups.

This is how it's always been I think; their model.

I don't think ST needs to move fast. It's a good quality editor. It doesn't need a bunch of new features every couple of months. Just getting a major update once a year is fine imo.

That's not the point, we were talking about plugins.

Installing an extension on vim (never done emacs) is something that does not just happen easily. There is no intuitive search for extensions built in, you likely have to install software that manages your plugins.

VSCode on the other hand rarely requires more than a single click through a built in interface.

The plugin ecosystem exists for command line editors, but it definitely has a learning curve

I personally do not use any of these package managers and instead use my systems package manager on Gentoo to manage everything. Gentoo has most of the popular projects in the ::gentoo repo under app-emacs, and packaging your own is only a few lines of bash.

In Emacs/Vim I can't even escape the program if I don't know a keyboard shortcut.

In Vscode even if I forgot Cmd+W/Q I can simply click the close button. Not to mention that all the shortcuts are just globally used shortcuts in all the other software.

While I respect praising by the community of Vim/Emacs, I really don't think it's beginner-friendly.

So anyone starting a software career virtually picks Vscode, gets used to it, and almost has no reason to switch to something else for now unless they need something extremely specific.

there is a close button in emacs. however unlike vscode, emacs can also run in the terminal

> So anyone starting a software career virtually picks Vscode, gets used to it, and almost has no reason to switch to something else for now unless they need something extremely specific

can be said about windows too. i started off on windows and jetbrains. today im on minimal linux, stumpwm as window manager, and emacs for everything except browsing. i find it very liberating having cut down my dependencies without having cut down functionality

Or, you know, you could just click on the File menu and click on Quit.

When I run Emacs with a blank config, the default display has this:

    Get help           C-h  (Hold down CTRL and press h)
    Emacs manual       C-h r        Browse manuals     C-h i
    Emacs tutorial     C-h t        Undo changes       C-x u
    Buy manuals        C-h RET      Exit Emacs         C-x C-c
    Activate menubar   M-`

and in Vim, there is no such display.

I'm not making that comparison.

GP's post was in response to the complaint that Emacs/Vim are hard to exit. They said that "Or, you know, you could just click on the File menu and click on Quit."

And I'm just saying you can't do that in the terminal.

Not sure what you're going on about.

The rare time I use vscode instead of neovim I always end up with a lot of random characters into the code and have to close it without saving for fear of having broken something. You call that user friendly?

User friendly is what most users find it easy to use.

Your argument is more on the lines that you are a legacy user who does't want to move.

The whole idea of using vim/emacs was when intellisense/autocomplete was in its infancy. And programming general required using typing skills as a autocomplete mechanism. The only real use of all that edit-commands-as-a-mini-language philosophy of vim is to write keyboard macros. Which again was needed because people lacked decent autocomplete features. Besides typing fast itself isn't connected to coding productivity these days.

Macros, substitutions and search commands are useful for many things and an editor like vim/neovim/emacs is not only used for code.

Nobody ever talked about typing fast.

With emacs this is a feature, not a bug ;)

have you seen the extent of available emacs packages? maybe it is a learning curve for a person who just learned how to power on a computer but i find emacs soo much more approachable

Atom was made to be infinitely customizable by using web technology. You can dynamically change everything you want with custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Nothing is off limits. Want to shrink the size of the tabs? Just throw in some CSS, everything is changeable.

Code on the other hand runs plug-ins in a separate isolated thread where they are left to communicate with the editor through an extension API. Every customization "hook" that a plugin has access to needs to be explicitly added in that extension API. The things that the devs didn't think (or want) to add are simply impossible. Want to shrink the size of the tabs? Tough luck (except for unsupported hacks).

Code is awesome, but I think Atom should get more credit for what it tried to do. It is arguably the most customizable text editor ever.

What I, and almost everyone else wants is extensions which provide real utility like language packs, linters, git tools, etc. All of this works well on VS code.

I actually use VS Code as well, but more like an IDE with tons of extensions, and Sublime is my 'basic' text editor.

I ended up purchasing the upgrade to Sublime 4, definitely worth the price.

While Vscode is my IDE now, I definitely love the instant-opening of Sublime.

Ironically, it's even launching faster than TextEdit.