Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by devjab 526 days ago
I'm not the person you asked but I chose Emacs over VSC because it's just a better fit for a lot of things for me. I do think the telemetry Microsoft harvests through VSC is an issue to consider. While it is "just" metadata and no file content, they're getting your entire project structure down to file extensions. I don't see why I would want Microsoft to know what I'm working on. Anyway, the key point for me was ORG mode and that plugins for Go and C++ suck(ed?) in VSC. There are other things, the intellisense is slow, the vim plugin is terrible, the constant Microsoft product pushes are annoying, there is no Magit and so on.

I think it's important to say that I don't dislike VSC as such at this point. Because I probably made it sound like I think it's terrible. I don't I think it's ok. I didn't mind using it for Typescript as an example. Over all I think it's average at best. I get why people use it, it's easy to setup. It's easy to share configurations and so on. I probably would have gone from vim to neovim if it wasn't for doom emacs though.

I think the major advantage both emacs and vim have though is that they're always good. A lot of VSC users are now switching to Zed and that hamsterwheel will go on and on. With vim or emacs you'll never really have to change anything.

4 comments

I’ve gone from vim to vsc, and now to sublime. Sublime has a nice plugin ecosystem and is in python as well, and most importantly has LSP support written by the authors. It also is wayyyyy faster than VSC now; basically as fast as VIM, but has a better UI and I have vim keyboard integration.
Pretty much the reasons I don't care about VSC. Sensible telemetry is not an issue for me, but pushing electron while there are much more performant solutions is one. I'm much more amenable to the Emacs and Vim's plugin/package solutions than VSC. And they're extraordinary stable.
I’m also unease about the open-source-but-not-really VSCode situation. I don’t know how useful an editor you can build from the available source, which is enough for me to not consider it seriously. I’ve been bitten before.
Without telemetry: https://vscodium.com/
Is it?

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/index....

> Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.