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Comment by deworms | Hacker News Reader

Emacs should have been what VSCode is now - a powerhouse of customizability that offers unmatched functionality by default. Instead it's a toy for some old people who are still holding onto the remnants of an age that passed a long time ago. Emacs is basically useless compared to VS Code, and its authors are what's holding it back. I don't see it bouncing back to popularity any time soon.

Anything you can do in Emacs, you can do in VS Code faster, better, and easier.

Emacs is being steered by a committee of living fossils that look condescendingly on people who expect a text editor to be discoverable, easy to learn, and productive out of the box. They make passive aggressive comments ridiculing anyone who wants Emacs to behave remotely like any other program. With this kind of leadership, it will be dead in a few years.

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> Emacs should have been what VSCode is now - a powerhouse of customizability that offers unmatched functionality by default.

+1.

Emacs is a powerhouse of customizability, and it needs to work on functionality by default.

> Instead it's a toy for some old people who are still holding onto the remnants of an age that passed a long time ago. Emacs is basically useless compared to VS Code, and its authors are what's holding it back.

I don't think Emacs is held back by its authors. The article might not make it clear but RMS does not contribute much to the vision or code of Emacs today. Read emacs-devel, and though there's occasionally some conflicts, the authors are keen on progress aligned with what people expect from an editor.

Emacs is a complex platform, owing to its unique vision on blurring the line between user and developer. The authors do a great job of keeping that up-to-date.

If you need to use a specific dialect of lisp most people won't be familiar with, it does a poor job at it. Lisp is not a language many people use today. NeoVim lets you use any language you want for writing extensions. VS Code uses javascript which is easy to learn and most developers already know it.

It's a great strength that NeoVim supports many languages, and VS Code uses Javascript.

Lisp is not widely used, and this is an impediment to Emacs' popularity.

However, when people speak about Emacs customizability, they are referring to a deeper level of customizability than most programs (even NeoVim/VS Code), in which its innards and UI are all subject to modification, at runtime, within the beast itself. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but it happens to be my preference at least.

> Lisp is not widely used

This is so unfortunate. Lisp has so many good things to teach us.

So does neovim. As an example:

https://github.com/rktjmp/lush.nvim#readme

> Anything you can do in Emacs, you can do in VS Code faster, better, and easier.

Show me how to do the following in VS Code:

1. Org mode, or anything as powerful as Org mode (org mode is one of the two major packages that keep people in Emacs - it's not an obscure thing).

2. Reading, writing, and managing email (e.g. adding a tag to an email). While you're at it, please make sure the org mode equivalent can have a TODO linking to a particular email.

3. IRC

4. Feed reader

I honestly have not searched whether these exist in VSCode, so it would be nice to know.

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