[bobajeff]

Emacs and Vim are terminal based though. So nice things like scroll bars, tabs, drag and drop etc. might be available as hacks but will disappoint in the ways in which they fail to work like a actual GUI interface. I'm also not a fan of model text editors.

For open source GUI text editors there sadly aren't many that match the feature and polish of vscode.

[achyudh]

While Emacs can run in a terminal, it is more widely used as a GUI application that can render images, PDFs, variable-pitch fonts, handle mouse support (drag-and-drop, menus, scrollbars), and even work on touchscreens such as on Android [1].

You are right that VS Code has a "nicer" out of the box UX (this is subjective of course), but Emacs offers a malleable environment. In VS Code, you are limited to what the APIs the developers decided to expose. If you want a specific behavior that isn't supported, you either fork the editor or create a feature request ticket and wait for someone to prioritize it. In Emacs, because you have full access to the internal runtime, you can implement that feature yourself in a couple of lines of Lisp.

1: https://kristofferbalintona.me/posts/202505291438/

[bobajeff]

Thanks, it's been so very long since I've tried emacs. I remember I didn't like how it looked. So I used vim instead. (There was no vscode back then.) So I never did give it much of a try.

Emacs might be a solid editor choice but my intuition is that it probably won't be worth it for the same reason LiteXL wasn't for me. If I do work on adding features to my editor I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in js, html and css. And if possible I'd rather start with a base that's mostly where I want it to be. Trying to turn emacs into vscode sounds like way more of a project than turning Theia or CodeMirror into vscode.

[f1shy]

Actually there are plenty of packages already which can near Emacs to VSC or Sublime in look and feel, and imho go circles around the 2 in functionality.

[bobajeff]

Care to link to those? I looked and all I found was this:

https://github.com/DevelopmentCool2449/visual-emacs

Which didn't really impress me terribly much.

[f1shy]

I don’t know them, because I do not like VSC and co. I just have a friend, and when I see his Emacs looks like sublime. Is some work to get it to look like that.

[progre]

Emacs is not terminal based, though you can run emacs in a terminal if you want to.

[katbyte]

Notepad++?

It’s been a while since I used it, but it’s one of the few things I miss on osx