Why not just use vscode if you want a more featured experience, and vim/neovim if you want a minimalistic experience?
(not including the fact that Microsoft owns vscode and that some parts are not open source, im aware of that, so no need to mention it)
Isn’t VS Code less feature ful than Emacs, not the other way around? Does it have keyboard macros, can I extend the editor by writing a function in Javascript in a scratch buffer and bind it to a key without needing to package the whole thing as an extension? I confess I haven’t tried VS Code but from what I hear it sounds like it wouldn’t let me automate things to anywhere near the extent I can in Emacs.
If you love vscode so much, may I introduce you to…
Vscode running inside Emacs!
more featured
You haven’t actually spent more than 30 seconds looking at emacs resources.
i think the real competition here is vim.
vscode is a user-friendly editor that you just start using as a no brainer. You unlikely to learn more as you go (maybe a couple of shortcuts). So you get what you see pretty much
vscode is like a lego set. Emacs is more like a piece of marble. Harder to work with but has so much more potential.
and btw, vscode is the minimalist here
Emacs is more like a piece of marble. Harder to work with but has so much more potential.
More like a ball of clay: infinitely and trivially malleable. And you can bake parts of it into ceramic whenever you want.
Such a weird and lazy question. emacs is over forty years old, has whole applications written in it and people have slowly modified their own configs for decades to be thousands of lines of code.
One reason is that VS Code hadn’t existed yet when I started using Emacs.
Another reason is customization. Emacs is one big Lisp interpreter, while VS Code is a desktop application with JavaScript frontend. VS Code would never achieve the level of customizability Emacs offers.
As someone else has mentioned, Emacs is the oldest and mature, so it is nearly impossible for a new editor to catch up with all of its functionalities.
Org Mode
you can run VS code in browser, but i can run browser in Emacs. That’s why Emacs > VS code. Also there are myriad of reasons to use Emacs, since it’s more than just editor. It’s environment that can be used to create anything you need to do what you want.