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Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

Who is actually using the GUI elements mentioned in the article? Emacs is a comfort zone where I don't need the mouse.

>...buttons could be improved with rounded corners...

I would worry if people started moving away from Emacs as text-centric. My biggest complaint with VSCode (which I do fully expect to take over and to which I will one day presumably have to migrate) is that there's so much damn UI for things. The terminal window isn't just a buffer of text like everything else, it's its own ungodly window that pops up differently. Most extensions are primarily UI instead of keyboard and text driven. There's a nice Magit clone which does things properly, and I'd love to see more effort on things like that. But fundamentally VSCode doesn't seem to have the right level of abstraction to allow all this.

The problem with VS Code is there is *not enough* UI. I desperately would like to have some toolbars and menu options, because the kotkeys and key-chords VS Code uses, where they aren't following conventions, are not easily discoverable.

They're in a bind because they are trying to straddle a market where you've got emacs an vim users to one side and Visual Studio users to the other. Some ability to customize the UI, even if it were provided by a plugin, would be helpful.

I use the Ctrl + shift + p for everything like that until I learn the shortcut.

Are they not discoverable via the command palette? I find Emacs very helpful here, commands are always prefixed sensibly and you can do fuzzy search on them anyway. You can run 'apropos' if you're really stuck and help is built in to every function. It'll show you bindings if you don't know them and invoke a command directly etc etc. I feel like VSCode has most of this. Besides, they're your key bindings anyway, I think it's worth investing in whatever's ergonomic for you given you'll likely spend a decade or more with an editor. One annoyance I had was that extensions were regularly changing commands and throwing away my bindings though.

I should be clear though, I am not suggesting they strip it to the bone at the expense of other users' tastes. I just hate that I can't do that _myself_ because it's not quite as low level as Emacs.

It's difficult to discover a command with the command palette if you don't already know what they've called it.

I dunno, I'm old. I use directories and folders and hierarchical organization instead of searching when I'm allowed to.

VS Code is offputting enough and different enough in conventions from everything else I use that I don't have a great deal of interest in learning it's idiosyncrasies where they depart from standard UX.

This is the exact issue I have with VSCode. I don't particularly like the keybinds in emacs, but the killer feature for me is that everything is a text buffer. Eshell, magic, lsp, I interact with them all in a similar way from the keyboard. It was the terminal in VSCode that brought me back to emacs

I'm using GUI Emacs. There is one thing I use the mouse for: resizing windows. Apart from that, GUI is more visually pleasing, it doesn't try to emulate graphics by fitting characters into the grid. When it wants to paint a line, it paints a line, not a column of "|" characters; same with arrows and whatever. Another advantage is that it gets the key presses directly instead of through the terminal. In the terminal it can't distinguish between e.g. "C-/" and some other keys (I don't remember which).

However, I'm looking for a better editor anyway. Emacs is too unresponsive at times. I'll probably either switch to a GUI version of neovim when one of them gets good enough[1], or write myself a new editor, because I haven't really seen anything promising outside of neovim.

[1]: I think neovim folks might have abandoned this idea, so I'm not holding my breath.

To clarify, I use the GUI version of Emacs as well, but I never interact with the buttons or UI quirks mentioned in the article.

My bad.

I'm using the GUI simply because I like `org-mode` inline images. It's just a cosmetic reason, really. It would be 99.99% functional from a terminal.

I’m a 30-year user of emacs. I still pick up the mouse to do something in emacs at least once a month.

I use Emacs GUI. I like the desktop integration, mouse support, rich fonts/themes.

You don't need the mouse to use GUI Emacs.

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