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Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

Just install Emacs. It respects your freedom, and it respects your rights.

Love it or hate it, VSCode has become the "default" for the ecosystem at large, especially for Web development. For me personally, moving away would end up costing me more time (in getting alternative text editors to work with my tooling, or doing without) than it takes me to dismiss these popups.

Doesn't take away from how awful it is that a corporation usurped the ecosystem like this, but I am not idealistic enough to fight the current.

I guess it's just more reason for me to continue to be happy that I mostly use IntelliJ with occasional trips into Fleet (their VSCode competitor)

addendum: it really sucks when a free product that has positioned itself as the defacto product starts to get obnoxious about taking your data (logging in) and charging you for things (Copilot), especially when it's a multinational megacorp who is probably creating and distributing such a product to gain market dominance and crowd out its competitors. (add: this part of the sentence is probably meaner than it needs to be. The people that made VSCode probably wanted to just make a really nice Atom enhancement that worked well with .net. This stuff has been business demands.)

More addendum: If Microsoft didn't want to be pushy about this, they could have included the option in a Version Update announcement on a new tab or something. Wherever release notes and release announcements are normally put.

If notifications for products from the vendor are ads, then JetBrains does ads just like Microsoft.

Lets talk about JetBrains pushing AI as well? Initially it couldn't even be disabled.

I don't think I've heard of Fleet but I'm definitely interested! Do you know if there's any info on what the pricing will be like when it's out of preview? I'm not against paying for my editor, but I also don't love the idea of a subscription and having to sign in and stuff.

I've only been using Emacs for about twelve years, so I'm still pretty new, but in that time I've heard the above statement ("it's the default") about Sublime Text, Atom, JetBrains IDEs, and now VSCode.

I wonder which editor you will learn next, when VSCode falls out of style. I will still be using Emacs.

I suppose, but these "default" tools have all had their place in the market because Emacs or Vim are evidently not meeting demand. Which gets to my point that telling someone to "just switch" is not very helpful.

The biggest advantage of VSCode is that it "just works". The UI is very intuitive, you can just install it and start coding. Meanwhile you can make a whole academic career out of "how to set up vim and Emacs", which is indeed fun in its own way, but it's not what most people need.

To give some kind of comparison, I love getting lost in C++ documentation and writing complex templates. It's a form of art. But when I want to actually write a program that does something, I do it in python, because it allows me to focus on the problem, rather than the tool.

I don't see this problem being resolved in near future. The core philosophy being vim and Emacs is incompatible with the idea of IDE that "just works".

I use Emacs when I’m code editing (especially when sshing). I love it but. The problem with emacs and vim to my mind is they are hard to configure. Like I’ve edited a .eMacs file but it’s in some lisp and adding plug ins isn’t intuitive. Maybe it’s better now, but it’s confusing. I use plain eMacs as distributed by my distro..

I use vs code annd jet brains too and it’s fairly straight forward to add in any plugin for this or that. They’re discoverable too. I don’t use a ton but some are helpful.

I bet it has some plugin manager like Vim (for which I use pathogen).

I also use VSCodium on the desktop simce Atom was abandoned and Vim when editing over ssh. I wanted to like Zed but everything is now infested with AI and the packaging sucks. I just want a nice looking UI desktop editor with Sublime style multiple cursors and without the BS. Git, Copilot etc is deactivated in my VSCode, I don't even use its terminal. But it keeps breaking things or adding crap. Of course, it needs to be open spurce and free. They can charge all they want for plugins and AI which I don't use.

Emacs and Vim serve the demand for a programmable editor for power users very well. They just aren’t in the market for a low-effort editor for users who don’t have their own preferences.

I got into XEmacs, back in 1995, as there were no UNIX alternatives to the nice Borland IDEs I was used to in PC land.

Have enough muscle memory for several meta commands, and could still write one or two things in ELisp, yet I rather use the "default" IDE and graphical editors than going back to Emacs other than when having to handle a remote session to a Linux machine and the alternative being VI.

I have attempted it and couldn't make it work.

Maybe i lacked the grit, and patience, or maybe emacs is not meant for beginners or windows. However, there is a need for docs on how to move from vscode to emacs.

Did you try an Emacs distribution like Doom Emacs or Space Emacs? Or did you try vanilla Emacs? The latter is not going to give you a very good IDE type experience without said grit, etc, so I recommend the former.

Also, there are lots of ways to run on Windows other than native such as WSL, Linux VM, Docker, etc. Though I ran the Portacle distribution quite successfully on native Windows once (when it was my only choice).

I tried standard emacs and space emacs. What tripped me most was keybindings(ctrl c doesn't work!?) and lack of command prompt (no idea if it didn't exist or needed plugins)

There were few more pain points of "thinking in buffer" instead of files.

All I can say is that entire experience made me appreciate the OOB experience of vscode.

Back in the day XEmacs used to have great Windows support, I dunno about standard Emacs.

Since Emacs is fully programmable, fully connected with virtually no “permissions” system, and there is no structure to scan, validate, or flag third-party extensions/elisp code, I would suggest that it stands as a prime vector for malware!

I would suggest that it stands as a prime vector for malware!

So still better than VS Code that is malware by itself.

> I would suggest that it stands as a prime vector for malware!

I would suggest you send an email to rms@gnu.org, he might disagree.

I have no idea who may receive or read his email messages.

For a long time in the early 90s, he set no password on his accounts at MIT. Anyone could, and did, log in to rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu and it was basically a "public access system".

Richard Stallman fundamentally rejects information security principles and practices. He absolutely hates it when systems are secure and impregnable. Richard Stallman is an extremist zealot; he's extraordinarily idealistic, but his ideals themselves are unrealistic for real-world operations.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256409

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421738

The GNU Project indeed itemizes a few "known security risks" in their own FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/Sec...

Okay that seems needlessly obtuse. I think yall would get along actually based on the tone and content of your replies.

Did they not precisely validate what I wrote? GNU themselves says caveat emptor when installing 3rd party code. There’s no trusted path and no validation, and they admit it.

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