How... Uh, how do you use computers then? Isn't everything we do with them in some way through "an app"?
I’m pretty sure they are referring to mobile/Web stuff. You do have to be very careful there…
Lazy young whippersnappers should come up with their own damn terms for new concepts in stead of just trying to co-opt and redefine existing ones.
E. g.: there was recently a post here promoting some group making “an app ecosystem for your terminal”. That’s very convenient — you immediately know you need to close the tab.
1. Missing out on "new innovations" (and using older gui/etc paradigms which don't mesh with anything else you are used to).
2. Finding ways to update your tool to take advantage of "new innovations", which costs time, and often gives you a worse outcome.
I was a vim user for 8 years, then used spacemacs for another 2, but have lately switched to VSCode (with vim mode, obviously). The ease of just downloading vscode and having it work with almost no tinkering, having it look good, and being able to, for the most part, double-click an extension name if I need it... that ease of use means that whatever learning curve I do have to pay sometimes, it's worth it.
(And the learning curve for making VSCode have the vim/emacs features I need was tiny compared to managing my vim/emacs config).
basically it seems less hackable, is that a wrong impression?
(and json files don't allow for comments right?)
That said, you can configure a lot of things you care about, e.g. you can do remappings, including complex remappings from "sequence of keys" to "sequence of keys or existing commands". And since there are lots of pre-defined commands etc, there's a lot you can do.
(BTW I mean this espeically in vim mode for vscode, I don't have experience with using vscode without it).
Vim and Emacs are console editors for me. The most significant difference for me is sensible mouse support. I used Emacs just for LaTeX, otherwise I use mostly unhacked vim. It is very useful to be familiar with one of them, but nano is awesome too and I always mention it for new developers.
I believe vscode is successful because it is simple. Just like how JSON was successful compared to XML for simple applications. It isn't better than XML, but most applications are too simple to warrant XML features and resulting complexity.
For C# I prefer VS instead of vscode and I fear vscode tries to be both, a code editor with extended features vs a fully integrated IDE. For some language like JS vscode already has become an IDE with advantages and disadvantages and it is quite often very opinionated here.
E.g. the simplest example - intellisense and inline linting, debugging etc. are all really awesome features. I've set them up once or twice with vim and emacs, but it's always a pain, always takes a long time, breaks often, etc. With VSCode, I click a button and I have everything I need for Python installed in a second.
That's the difference between actually using a feature, and not. When I install a new computer, I will actually use e.g. Python linting with VSCode, but not with vim, cause I won't bother to set it up.
For some other functionalities it is far more advance, like support for Git (magit) or very fast navigation inside the project (projectile, Helm etc), mass renaming things (grep, ag and wgrep) etc.
In general IDEs are very bad at text manipulation and good at structural manipulation, whereas Emacs is very good at text manipulation and okay at structural manipulation (or excellent for it but only for Lisp).
The set of functionalities in an IDE is fixed, whereas Emacs is extensible, by it users.
Support for git is awesome in vscode. You install a plug-in and get great support for various commands. Another plugin and you can have every line annotated with a git blame (a faded text at the end of the line), as well as having a git blame annotation at the top of each function. These were game changers for me. Though full disclosure, I haven't used magit much - but that's part of the problem. The learning curve on the vscode stuff was zero.
Project navigation is dead simple in vscode, I don't think emacs has any advantage.
As for text manipulation, as a vim snob, I'll just point out that text editing is really only good with Vim. Luckily vscode has a vim mode that's decent. Not perfect at all, but decent.
As for extensibility - all the above are plugins. It is extensible.
That being said, there is a cost. Tools that adapt with the times try to reduce the effort needed to get contemporary tasks done. Stable tools tend to reflect the times in which they were created (or at least peaked), meaning that it may take more effort to get things done in the here and now. Unfortunately, Emacs is very much a reflection of this.
Vim 8 broke this philosophy though - it changed defaults and broke workflows - changing how search works by default, breaking copy-paste by including some mouse support so when I click a line, it moves the cursor.
These aren't security improvements, these aren't transparent improvements (like allowing arrow keys as well as hjkl was way back), and they're not even odd workflows like xkcd.com/1172. Search is presumably one of the most used functions in vim, and I'm sure that clicking and highlighting text to copy into a different application isn't unusual. Changing the default behaviour is a choice that the developers made, presumably to "make vim better". I don't want vim "better", I want it stable, if I wanted "better" I'd use something that redesigns itself every 5 years.
What's worst though, is while I can adjust my workflow to automatically copy a fixed .vimrc onto any machine I ssh to, it leaves me wondering "what will change next". It's unsettling.