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My main problem with emacs is the lack of out of the box source code indexing and autocomplete.

I’m sure there’s a way to set it up, but even after years of using emacs, I haven’t figured it out.

It took me 10 minutes to get VS code to import and index a non-trivial C++ code base, and that’s with no prior VS Code experience. It even popped up some hints when stuff started going sideways.

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If you're willing to give Emacs another shot, check out LSP-mode [0]. It's an implementation of the language server protocol, the same tech that powers the autocomplete/jump-to-def/etc. in VS Code, and so it offers exactly the same functionality for all the same languages. It's true that it's not built into Emacs, but it's easy to set up and works well.

It's been a total game changer for me - it's allowed me to transition to using Emacs full-time for professional Python programming.

[0] https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode

Oddly, I've gotten bitten by code indexing tools so many times, I like that it is not part of my editor. I sometimes think of seeing up autocorrect. But I find I prefer a greppable codebase over an autocorrect one.

That said, plenty of starting packages that do have this setup. I think doom Emacs is the popular one nowadays.

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