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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

I only tried once about 15 years ago (from GUI IDEs/editors) and it didn't appeal to me. Now with GitHub Copilot and the like I think the use of command-line editors will further diminish for generalized programming tasks, although they will always have a place in system administration.

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Realistically, there’s not much emacs can’t do, including integrating with copilot[1]. I think it’s niche isn’t system administration, but people who have the time, energy, and interest to really invest in their tools. Its configurability is second to none, and it’s not going anywhere. Emacs will still be around long after vscode is forgotten, and it’s nice to know that the time I spend learning my editor won’t go to waste when some big corp decides to up and leave, or the programming zeitgeist moves on to the shiny new thing.

[1]: https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el

Emacs will still be around long after vscode is forgotten

Neither antecedent (vscode dies) nor consequent (emacs survives) is at all assured.

True! I guess there’s only one way to find out.

History rather suggests that both antecedents will occur, assured or not. MS isn't known for keeping tools around for decades.

Visual C++ turns 30 next February.

So maybe there's an exception for tools with Visual in the name.

And all of Office.

Nothing lasts forever, but Emacs has enough momentum behind it that I'd be shocked if it dies within our lifetime (assuming there's no general collapse of technological civilization, of course). Even if the FSF were to become defunct, enough people care about Emacs and are involved with it that somebody will continue developing it.

VSCode's development is so totally dominated by one company that it's hard to imagine it continuing to go strong if they decided to discontinue it (Cf. the fate of Atom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Emacs is not a command line editor (but it can run in a terminal if needed).

It has a proper GTK interface and even runs natively on Wayland today.

The GTK GUI interface isn't just a niche fork or addon that nobody uses, it's really the primary interface for Emacs and how most people probably use it.

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