[kstrauser]

I used Emacs for a couple of decades but switched over to VS Code after a couple of days of playing with it. I love Emacs and the concept of infinite configurability. But as it turns out, I don't actually use most of that flexibility. It's more common that I'll install a package, tweak a couple of knobs, and get on with work.

Well, VS Code offers the equivalents of all the Emacs packages that I actually use, and they come with sane defaults. Once I've tweaked the Python module a little bit, I tend to ignore its other options and get back to editing code. And in that code editing environment, I honestly prefer VS Code. The key bindings feel like other modern apps (yay for using the same Mac shortcuts for moving around that every thing else uses). Menus (and their shortcuts) work as expected. I don't have Emacs's beautiful macros, but I do have multi-cursor editing which is beautiful in a different way. It's fast. It looks pretty, with nice easier-to-install themes and icon packages. Basically, VS Code does everything that I ask of Emacs, but in a modern package.

I still love Emacs. I had switched to Sublime Text at one point but came back to the 'Macs because ST wasn't good enough to win me over permanently. And I definitely still love the idea that I can rewrite all of Emacs to make it my own personal slice of editing heaven that is optimized for me and me alone. That's wonderful! But now that there's an excellent, MIT-licensed, well supported alternative that doesn't everything that I want in practice, I'm sold.

But if MS ever loses the plot and ruins VS Code, I'll be back on Emacs in a heartbeat.

[nobleach]

VS Code does not come with magit... and that in and of itself is a great reason to use Emacs. (This is coming from a daily Vim user) There really is nothing like Magit even as a plugin for VSC. VSC's scm mode is what I'd consider "barely passible". You can do stuff with it, but it's tiny/ugly/not very friendly. And that GitLens plugin doesn't really help with staging files/hunks etc... it's more meta info about past commits.

[kstrauser]

I do miss that. Magit is a work of art.

That said, I've realized that I don't do that much SCM stuff inside my editor. It's nice to have a beautiful client, but I'm comfortable with the git commandline itself and found myself using it for the tricky stuff, even when I had Magit at my fingertips.

My main editor-integrated workflow involves switching branches, committing, pulling, and other routing stuff that VSC handles just fine. It's definitely no Magit, but it covers 95% of the stuff I do.

[jkdufair]

Emacs has multiple cursors: https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el

I used VSCode for a few years, but never found a way to work with code in semantic units vs. as text. And I like that no matter what language I'm working in, the experience is the same. VSCode plugin editors may or may not (read: wouldn't have) agreed on a set of conventions for working with code independent of the programming language.

[kstrauser]

I tried that, but it never worked as well for me as it did in Sublime Text, or more recently VS Code.

I get what you mean about Emacs's nearly universal code conventions, but that's an example of something I personally found to be more useful in theory than in practice. While I love the concept, 95% of the time I'm hacking around in Python. The rest of the time is a hodge-podge of shell scripts and the rare C snippet. Maybe a little SQL now and then, or perhaps some JavaScript. When I'm working in something that isn't my usual, I find myself spending much more time reading code than writing it, and in that context I don't get as much benefit from those conventions.

Of course this is all incredibly subjective. If you get a lot of benefit from that, awesome! I can definitely see the appeal. I just don't feel like it makes a whole lot of difference for me.

[8456523]

If MS ever loses the plot and ruins VS Code, I'll probably switch to some fork of VS Code along with millions of other people.

[kstrauser]

Most likely I would, too, as long as they don't go Oracle on it.