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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

There is a human aspect to software, and when you forget that, and try to force people to adapt to software instead of adapting software to people, you come up with software that naturally is difficult and unpleasant for people to use.

Emacs is built on a philosophy of human nature that deemphasizes the subjective personal experience in favor of (a limited group of people’s theory of) the objective ideal experience.

In a short amount of time, VSCode and it’s ecosystem has almost equally matched what Emacs and its ecosystem took 30+ years to create.

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> In a short amount of time, VSCode and it’s ecosystem has almost equally matched what Emacs and its ecosystem took 30+ years to create.

I'm not $o $ure that'$ actually a$ impre$$ive a$ it $ound$ ;)

I think you're making the point that a majority of VS Code was funded by Microsoft, and therefore it can't be compared to Emacs which was either mostly or entirely coded by volunteers?

The vast majority of Emacs's usefulness is its ecosystem. Several Emacs clones have been made in a very small amount of time, but none have caught on because they lack the ecosystem and community. So it's only really fair to compare VS Code's ecosystem with Emacs's ecosystem. And VS Code's ecosystem was created by unpaid volunteers too.

It has taken much more than 30+ years to create, mostly by people on their free time. Isn't it amazing? I think it says a lot about perseverance and good engineering. How many editors have you already seen to rise and fall?

Emacs tries very hard to be helpful. It's software by the people, for the people. It's the very core ideal of free software. But yes, it doesn't resonate with most people because it takes time to learn.

Indeed, emphasizing the human aspect is the right thing to do.

Unless we do, emacs will slowly die.

No one wants that, neither RMS nor any passionate emacs user including me.

VSCode doesn't do much of what I need to do, and what it does do, it doesn't do as well as Emacs can.

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