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by aaravchen 215 days ago
I did exactly the same, though I wasn't an Evil mode user. I quickly found VSCod(e|ium) lacks the internals to even do many of the basic useful things of Emacs.

BTW, if you're an Evil mode user, Zed is probably your better choice. It has more focus on Vim-style keybindings.
1 comments
hollerith 215 days ago
Similar story here. I used vscode for about 3 months for all my editing needs without even having Emacs installed, but returned to Emacs because of how hard it was to learn how to modify vscode (I'm not a web dev) compared to modifying Emacs and because of a vague impression that vscode is slower in responding to my inputs.
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aaravchen 214 days ago
It's definitely slower when doing any intensive background activities that Emacs would normally offload. But I've found VSCode has features readily available as one-click installs that are very difficult and convoluted to setup in Emacs. For some of those you end up either settling for less-ideal tools in Emacs, or because you're not an expert in the specifics of the tool being integrated, you end up with a much less optimized integration. And in either case you can actually end up with a net-worse performance in Emacs, even though the VSCode core is in a far less performant language than Emacs.
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karthink 214 days ago
> It's definitely slower when doing any intensive background activities that Emacs would normally offload.

Emacs is single threaded and can't offload any elisp code. Even the stuff it can offload as background OS processes report in to the main loop and share time with editing, so a chatty background process can and does frequently lock up Emacs. So I'm surprised that VSCode, whose runtime is better suited to async jobs, ever feels slower than Emacs.

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hollerith 214 days ago
I actually agree with that. I should have added a qualifier to my previous comment (grandparent), namely, I use Emacs mainly for things other than programming, and if I ever start programming full-time in a language other than Lisp, then, yeah, (for the reasons you give) I'd probably use vscode instead of Emacs to do that.

I use Emacs for managing files (with Dired) running shell commands, bookkeeping, keeping notes and chatting with LLM services.

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