[troad]

I feel like the oldest cycle in tech is the "easy and good enough" defeating the "more elegant / powerful, but more tricky".

Re VS Code, I wouldn't say it's in a weird limbo - on the contrary, I think that a "smart-ish, extensible editor" is exactly what lots of people actually want. IDEs are too heavy for many folk, vim/emacs too hard, Notepad too dumb. Things like VS Code hit a sweet spot, hence their popularity.

[cess11]

Emacs is very simple. It has point-and-click menus and tries very hard to generously interpret mistakes and show helpful error messages. I wouldn't call it tricky, unlike the command language in vim.

Power tools aren't as common as regular hammers and saws and so on, i.e. 'less popular', but among professionals few would prefer the unpowered ones just because the threshold to bring one out is lower.

[troad]

That's interesting; I find vim so much more intuitive than emacs. I find commands easier to reason about (and easier on the fingers) than chords. `dd` over `C-a C-k` or `C-S-Backspace`, for example.

I also think the discoverability in emacs, despite the nice point-and-click interface, is always going to be hampered by the idiosyncratic vocabulary. If you don't already know emacs, `Buffers > *scratch*` isn't going to mean anything to you. And if you do know emacs, you're just going to use the chord. So who's the audience for the point-and-click? People who know what scratch buffers are, but don't know how to use emacs? I don't imagine there are many of those.

> Power tools aren't as common as regular hammers and saws and so on, i.e. 'less popular', but among professionals few would prefer the unpowered ones just because the threshold to bring one out is lower.

Agreed, but I suspect many more professional programmers use VS Code than vim and emacs put together. Though I suspect even more use IDEs.

[cess11]

Maybe, but the basics of text editing are quite obvious. There are large buttons that are easily recognisable, and you'll quickly realise that a buffer is something like an open file.

Sure, that might be the case. I'm not as sure it is good just because it might be the case.