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Comment by bananaface | Hacker News Reader

As someone who uses Emacs (which is a terrible piece of software in its own right), looking at the top feature requests for VS Code is like looking into the twilight zone. It lacks absurdly basic functionality.

Granted, they made Electron run fast enough to be usable but I wouldn't call it good software.

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It might lack functionality that you use on a daily basis, but I don't think it lacks any objectively basic functionality. In my opinion this is proven by the fact that thousands (millions?) of programmers, including me, work with VS Code on a daily basis.

What's the alternative? All editors are kind of crap. Compare them to raw level of engineering you find in, say, a video game. It's a different world.

Imagine VS Code was exactly how it is now, but had the extensibility of Emacs. It would blow everything else out of the water. Why isn't it like that?

The extensibility of emacs is insane is why, it really is more like an OS that happens to have editor functionality. I think the only thing that even gets close is Eclipse which has a ton of performance issues which I'm convinced are due to the (enterprise-y) way they try to achieve that extensibility. After that would be the IntelliJ platform, it's usually much faster and nicer to use but also has performance issues and is known for using a ton of RAM.

VS Code is doing well here compared to its competition. It is quite extensible, you can add extensions to it written in JavaScript that can add new UI and make changes to the editor view. It's also much more performant than either of the other two IDEs I mentioned, even after you load it up with extensions to replicate some of the most used features from those IDEs.

> Why isn't it like that?

Because most of us don't care. I need my code editor to just work out of the box. I want to be able to write code and install a few plugins to enhance the tools I'm using. Hacking my editor is a waste of my time and even if I wanted to, I'm certainly not going to learn lisp to do it.

Sublime Text is nice if you care about good engineering and performance.

your definition of good software here reminds me of the critic in Ratatouille who loves food so much he doesn't eat any of it. must be terrible living in a world where everything sucks as badly as you perceive it.

Hacker News, which is literally just text, can't display every comment in this post. There's a disclaimer at the top. Scroll up and read it.

How much money does the Y Combinator Web team receive? Do you think its enough that they should be able to render... Text?

This might be off topic, but what basic functionality does Emacs have that VS code doesn't? I know there's SLIME and Org, but I don't think you meant that.

Difficult to answer directly, but scanning through the most popular feature requests, most of the non-VSCode-specific feature requests have been solved (somewhere) by Emacs:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3A...

I will say that this was way worse a couple of years ago. They seem to have added a lot since then.

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