| I used Emacs for all development work from about 1990 to 2018. About 28 years of development work in a dozen different programming languages. I also used Emacs for reading Usenet News and my email. I also used it for calendaring, planning, tracking work and a few other things. Gnus made Emacs a great Usenet news reader, but I could never get it to fit with my email regimen. And eventually Usenet died too. For about a decade I used a mail client that someone else originally wrote, but which I modified over the years to do email like I wanted to. But this became really tedious to maintain alone so I have up. Along the way I tried various IDEs like the tools from IntelliJ and Eclipse. None of them took. In fact, I figured it had to be me, so I promised myself to spend a few months every 2-3 years or so trying to get used to IDEs. (I still can't stand the IntelliJ and Eclipse tools). I think what made me switch to VSC was that I eventually grew tired of the constant annoyance of having to fix my setup so it would be reasonably useful for Go development. Emacs support for the Go language server was slow and shaky, and eventually I got so tired of having to make a patchwork of Emacs packages work that I gave Visual Studio Code a second chance. And the second time around it stuck. I'm not entirely sure why it stuck, but it did. It's been 5 years and I'm still using it. And I'm still not entirely sure why. I think it is mostly that I'm a programmer - not an editor enthusiast. Emacs was a pain in the neck to keep running when I switched. I liked Emacs, but VSC has better support for just about any language you care to program in. I ditched Emacs because I'm interested in writing code. I'm not interested in spending a day figuring out how to keep barely working Go support running so I can get work done. It's a tool. And when maintaining the tool starts eating into my productivity, it isn't worth the effort. The problem with Emacs is that it doesn't have a sufficiently large community. Which in turn means that if you are interested in creating tooling, your efforts will have a much bigger payoff if you choose something millions of other developers use. This is a vicious cycle. Last I checked, VSC had about 14 million users. Out of a global population of 25'ish million developers. That's slightly over half the global developer population. That's a pretty big market. I think a fair guess (given the stack overflow surveys) is that less than a million people use Emacs as their primary development environment. Which I find surprisingly high, but it should give people hope. Is VSC a fad? Who gives a crap? What matters is that, for me, and for a lot of other people, it is a better tool than Emacs. Because it is. If VSC is replaced by something else that works even better, and VSC disappears: who cares. Better tools is a good thing. Getting overly attached to tools that offer less is just weird and unproductive. |