Before you get all smug, Vim people, this applies just as much to you as to us. :P
I'll probably never let go of Emacs, but have encouraged both of my kids to avoid it and use VSCode instead.
I'll probably never let go of Emacs, but have encouraged both of my kids to avoid it and use VSCode instead.
Emacs' key idea is a composable environment, which translates poorly to non-LISP languages and other programmable editors due to their more rigid design. It's really an operating system with a non-conventional architecture.
There are still things I miss which are impossible to replicate in vscode without breaking it, but I feel the out of the box experience and reduction in configuration complexity is a rather large net positive.
vim is still what I use to edit stuff via ssh and in docker images, though.
But nowadays, it's just VSCode. It may not be open source, and it may not be a particularly exciting (or good?) text editor. But it has become so ubiquitous that I'd just short-change my students if I recommended anything else.
They'd still occasionally see me type into my Emacs (which looks nothing like stock Emacs). And sometimes it would even get a kid or two interested. Some even switched to Emacs because of those classes. I have since given up teaching, though.