same boat. I switched to codium mostly out of purity from AI, and I'd really like it to stay that way, while still getting other QoL improvements. I'm pretty concerned that there's not enough to justify the niche, though.

Why would you look to make your own code editor?

There are so many already and for example NeoVim is great and would allow you to make modifications as you please.

I’m not trying to disprove your argument, rather I’m interested in your motivations

My guess is they're vastly underestimating the time and effort that would take, however, I understand the motivation somewhat, as there's no guarantee that whatever alternative to VSCode you settle on won't also eventually go all-in on AI. For example, KDevelop is planning on heavy AI integration soon.

If I have to bet, I will absolutely go for MS enshitifying it beyond reasonable usability, in one way or another, more soon than later.

Making an editor is anice endeavor. But there are plenty of, which are extremely well developed, open source, in many directions, emacs and vim the most prominent. But many others out there.

Emacs and Vim are terminal based though. So nice things like scroll bars, tabs, drag and drop etc. might be available as hacks but will disappoint in the ways in which they fail to work like a actual GUI interface. I'm also not a fan of model text editors.

For open source GUI text editors there sadly aren't many that match the feature and polish of vscode.

While Emacs can run in a terminal, it is more widely used as a GUI application that can render images, PDFs, variable-pitch fonts, handle mouse support (drag-and-drop, menus, scrollbars), and even work on touchscreens such as on Android [1].

You are right that VS Code has a "nicer" out of the box UX (this is subjective of course), but Emacs offers a malleable environment. In VS Code, you are limited to what the APIs the developers decided to expose. If you want a specific behavior that isn't supported, you either fork the editor or create a feature request ticket and wait for someone to prioritize it. In Emacs, because you have full access to the internal runtime, you can implement that feature yourself in a couple of lines of Lisp.

1: https://kristofferbalintona.me/posts/202505291438/

Thanks, it's been so very long since I've tried emacs. I remember I didn't like how it looked. So I used vim instead. (There was no vscode back then.) So I never did give it much of a try.

Emacs might be a solid editor choice but my intuition is that it probably won't be worth it for the same reason LiteXL wasn't for me. If I do work on adding features to my editor I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in js, html and css. And if possible I'd rather start with a base that's mostly where I want it to be. Trying to turn emacs into vscode sounds like way more of a project than turning Theia or CodeMirror into vscode.

Actually there are plenty of packages already which can near Emacs to VSC or Sublime in look and feel, and imho go circles around the 2 in functionality.

Care to link to those? I looked and all I found was this:

https://github.com/DevelopmentCool2449/visual-emacs

Which didn't really impress me terribly much.

I don’t know them, because I do not like VSC and co. I just have a friend, and when I see his Emacs looks like sublime. Is some work to get it to look like that.

Emacs is not terminal based, though you can run emacs in a terminal if you want to.

Notepad++?

It’s been a while since I used it, but it’s one of the few things I miss on osx

There are very performant and capable options like SublimeText out there https://www.sublimetext.com/

How is Sublime's plugin ecosystem these days?

I'd love to move back to it (or rather, use it for dev work beyond opening large log files to search for things), or atleast have it as a backup for vscode's inevitable enshittification.

which sublimetext are you talking about? SublimeText 2, SublimeText 3, or SublimeText 4 which is unreleased but that you can download?