[fr2null]

It might lack functionality that you use on a daily basis, but I don't think it lacks any objectively basic functionality. In my opinion this is proven by the fact that thousands (millions?) of programmers, including me, work with VS Code on a daily basis.

[bananaface]

What's the alternative? All editors are kind of crap. Compare them to raw level of engineering you find in, say, a video game. It's a different world.

Imagine VS Code was exactly how it is now, but had the extensibility of Emacs. It would blow everything else out of the water. Why isn't it like that?

[amaranth]

The extensibility of emacs is insane is why, it really is more like an OS that happens to have editor functionality. I think the only thing that even gets close is Eclipse which has a ton of performance issues which I'm convinced are due to the (enterprise-y) way they try to achieve that extensibility. After that would be the IntelliJ platform, it's usually much faster and nicer to use but also has performance issues and is known for using a ton of RAM.

VS Code is doing well here compared to its competition. It is quite extensible, you can add extensions to it written in JavaScript that can add new UI and make changes to the editor view. It's also much more performant than either of the other two IDEs I mentioned, even after you load it up with extensions to replicate some of the most used features from those IDEs.

[ativzzz]

> Why isn't it like that?

Because most of us don't care. I need my code editor to just work out of the box. I want to be able to write code and install a few plugins to enhance the tools I'm using. Hacking my editor is a waste of my time and even if I wanted to, I'm certainly not going to learn lisp to do it.

[furbyhater]

Sublime Text is nice if you care about good engineering and performance.