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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know why anyone in their right mind would use emacs, but it isn't like it costs anything but a minuscule amount of disk space to keep it around, so who cares? The war is over now we must all ally against VSCode and any other web-browser-as-a-text-editor monstrosities. Except nano users, they don't get a vote.

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I find VScode really slows me down. Gotta WIMP things that are 'wired' from my brain to the kbd via emacs. I honestly do not at all understand why anybody would use VScode except to cut people's productivity. At least, for me, anyway. I work in the embedded space, so C on the metal, and lots of python elsewhere.

I prefer vim, but some things VSCode has going for it:

* The plugin system seems fairly decent, and given it's popularity, there's usually a plugin for most things. There's a decent vim-mode plugin, linters that would take me a while to get working in my .vimrc, etc.

* It is fundamentally closer to a text editor than an IDE, so it'll do sane things like give you the option to use the system's python installation rather than some janky, ancient built-in version.

I dunno. I tutor for an intro programming class, getting them to install anything or work on the command line can be an uphill battle, VSCode is the best editor that will get widespread adoption in that kind of environment I think.

I use neovim in VSCode. My setup is neovim (via brew) + VSCode + VSCode Neovim (extension) + clangd (as a language server) with which I am extremely happy.

Would you mind sharing your setup?

MacBook Air

  install VSCode
  brew install nvim
  install XCode command line utils for clangd
    alternatively, install clang with brew
  in VSCode install the clangd VSCode extension
  in VSCode install VSCode Neovim extension

There's one bug that annoys me and I think it's a VSCode bug. You can navigate right by hitting the space bar. But tapping it multiple times corrupts the line buffer. This doesn't happen with right arrow.

So is Vim just run in one of VSCode's terminals?

What's VSCode providing here compared to something like a terminal with tmux?

In the olden times, it was Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.

My fav was "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow" ... though, that was 20 years ago :-D

And today it's Generally Not Used Except by Middle Aged Computer Scientists.

literally true; my first linux box didn't fly until I upgraded from 4MB to 16, at which point I could run emacs, g++, a shell, and X windows at the same time.

Eight megabytes sounds svelte these days.

I use it because I hate vim and need a decent CLI based editor when I ssh into machines.

That is becomming less and less common though with good deployment tools.

Once you learn the shortcuts it's hard to unlearn them. And they work in every text field on Linux if you set the option.

Isn't VSCode built with electron?

Yeah exactly, a web-browser-as-a-text-editor.

You can run in browser as well

https://vscode.dev/

Talk about bloat - so we now need to install another mini os in our os to run a text editor? :)

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