IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

I would really like to see this kind of work be done upstream. Emacs still looks the same as it did decades ago despite other editors advancing and becoming more user friendly.

I'm afraid that many people consider "looking the same as decades ago" a feature...

Please, no. Emacs could use some interface/toolkit update, I don't deny that. And I like IDE features. I use tree-sitter, LSPs, copilot.el, copilot-chat.el, and others all day, every day.

But don't force me to turn off treemacs, and minimap like I have to do in VSCode all the time just because some useless, space-wasting eye-candy is trendy.

A huge portion of the emacs community seems resistant to any UI improvement. I think it's a counterculture thing.

Switching the default experience away from what people have grown used to over decades seems incredibly rude (despite what commercial software has normalized).

The magic of emacs is infinite customizability. And it's quite easy for users to find and start with emacs "distributions" or "starter packs". So that's probably the best route forward.

Potential improvements:

1 Base emacs continues to make it easier to try out a bunch of configurations and switch between them, obviating solutions like chemacs

2 There's a web repository of a a variety of starter packs with screenshots and reviews and installation instructions, to help beginners find everything in one place.

3 ...

It's because a lot of us resist the implicit argument that UI changes are automatically improvement when in fact it's just as often regression.

Emacs is probably the most user-friendly editor. Its just not very beginner-friendly.

Yep. Look at IntelliJ. It just copied VsCode when it already had a great UI where things were easy to find and consistent. Now it’s got meaningless icons and hides important stuff by default, making it modern but far worse than before. Thank goodness emacs is not trying to chase the latest and stupidest.

There is no better UI for text editing that I have ever come across. I'm not sure why so many people are resistant to the idea that emacs has the correct answer to most UI issues. More programs would stand to take lessons from emacs. Emacs is, in its own right, a very successful piece of software. When eclipse was a thing everyone was saying how great it was vs emacs. But eclipse is gone (I think?) and emacs is still GOATed.

There's a particular kind of hubris from non emacs users (especially those who swear by new ides), that us losers are somehow deprived. We are not and don't need your advice. Nothing to do with counterculture. I tried many editors before I became obsessed with emacs.

Could be done with a flag tbh. One version to opt in. Next version it’s opt out.

Nonsense. Many emacs users spend their whole lives inside of it so they're quite sensitive to what is actually an improvement and what is not. The arrival of the various modern completion packages -- vertico, orderless, consult, etc. have been welcomed ... but note that these are all add-on packages. Likewise, all of the "improvements" provided by the OP are a matter of loading and configuring packages.

People who aren't regular emacs users tend not to understand it and are not reliable reporters about the editor or its community.

It can hardly be called resistance to improvement, when everyone do improve it - just in their own ways. The default isn't some fashion statement, some aesthete that's objectively good (though I am sure some people do subjectively like it). But it's meant to be sort of a least presumptuous blank state that everyone can radically overhaul. So arguably it's an encouragement for improvement just like everything else in Emacs, which focuses on making the tools for improvement easier.

It's just that "improvement" as a matter of public consensus that everyone can agree on to elect the next blank slate has been to impossible to settle on. But the counterculture here broadly might be extreme reluctance to inconvenience even a minority of existing users, in pursuit of market share/growth.

> Emacs still looks the same as it did decades ago

That’s a good thing. I don’t want to change my habits every time a designer of whatever product I use decides that he deserves a raise and breaks my workflow in some subtle way.

It’s not counterculture. It’s understanding of what’s important. Functionality, discoverability and extendability over opinionated UI/UX that nobody asked for.

The problem is that you need to spend 20 years to get out of the "beginner" zone.

>But eclipse is gone (I think?) and emacs is still GOATed.

The 2024 stack overflow developer survey [0] puts Eclipse at over double Emac's market share. If Eclipse is gone, then Emacs is double gone. Emacs struggles to attract and retain new users. This advice is not calling existing Emacs users deprived. It's rooted from the bad defaults giving new users a bad impression of Emac's viability because the default is so bad. If emacs built out proper telemtry they could actually track how the defaults they provide affect the new user experience in order for them to optimize it and figure out what users are looking for.

[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology

The curse as a power user is that you want to know how it works. I let that feeling go with emacs. I've been happily using it since. My first gateway and killer use case was magit. Life with git will never be the same.

I didn't downvote you, but you have a misconception.

There's no such thing as an Emacs "look". Its appearance, UI and UX, are wildly different depending on how the user wants it to look and behave. Considering that it is a very configurable system that happens to expose building blocks for a text editor, every Emacs installation is thus different from another.

We could say that the Emacs GUI toolkit and perhaps its internals are dated by modern standards, but even those would be personal preferences. Being single-threaded is arguably holding it back in some aspects, though that isn't a major limitation for most use cases.

Well people will vote with their mouse clicks, and they have, < 1% of devs use Emacs vs VS Code which is probably 20-30x.

> If emacs built out proper telemtry they could actually track how the defaults they provide affect the new user experience in order for them to optimize it and figure out what users are looking for.

I can't tell if this is an attempt at humor or something people actually believe

My comment is discussing the defaults. Most users will use the defaults and not customize their editor, especially if they are just using it for the first time. The defaults are important.

The single threaded issue is a problem, but one that can be somewhat worked around. I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.

> Most users will use the defaults and not customize their editor

But those are not the users who choose Emacs in the first place. Emacs is made for customization.

Besides, there are many preconfigured distributions of it, such as the one discussed here, which can effectively be used as the defaults, if you don't like the ones shipped OOB.

> I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.

Well, I reckon you're wrong. Emacs in all of its incarnations has been in use for nearly half a century, and its adoption has never been greater. Some people will point to low percentages in developer surveys, but that is the wrong metric to focus on. Its usage will never reach mainstream numbers, which is probably for the best, but it will continue to be enjoyed by enthusiastic users for a long time to come.

I’m 25 years in and still firmly in the beginner zone

I mean, okay? That’s their choice. Not everything is a competition.

It is, the default UI is stable and can be changed somewhat easily.

> If emacs built out proper telemtry they could actually track

Good God, NEIN!

> and becoming more user friendly.

Familiar UX is not the kind of multiplier. Learning Lisp REPL idioms is the multiplier. Selling Emacs with "easy" may have adverse effects in the long run - it sets the wrong expectations from the get-go. Every Emacs discussion typically gets a few "I tried Emacs for a long time and it just didn't work for me..." type of comments. When you dig deeper, you typically hear that they've been trying to use mostly the editor, ignoring much of the Lisp functionality. Unlocking the power of Lisp is what gets you into "turbo" mode in Emacs.

I get it - Elisp is an absolute opposite of being easy and intuitive, even experienced coders who already used modern Lisps like Clojure often complain that it just doesn't feel comfortable. Common Lispers don't like it either. Schemers have little love to share for it as well - it's a common theme.

Unfortunately, that's the Lisp we have, and until we figure out a better alternative, we have no choice. FWIW, it's still a Lisp, and it's still far better than anything else that's non-lispy. The simplicity and dynamism of Lisp is what allows you to quickly move forward, to build things that defy expectations, extend things beyond common sense when required.

We have many examples of when people with no programming background grind through the Elisp tutorial without any prejudice and start building things that eventually turn into legendary packages. Perhaps it's more valuable to cater "beginner Emacs experience" for these kinds of personalities, rather than trying to appeal to reactjs/springboot/django divas with "decades of programming experience" that demand tabs, sidebars and minimaps; twist their faces whenever they have to stare at Elisp stacktraces and complain that "Emacs doesn't look modern enough"?

There are no "Emacs experts". Bedrock of Emacs is Lisp. Lisp is the essence of computation itself. It's both simple to understand (5 basic special forms) and impossible to master at the same time - you can construct entire universes with those 5 basic building blocks - quote, if, lambda, let, and set. If someone finds something cannot be achieved in Emacs they either are wrong, or wrong at the point in time - theoretically, anything can be done in Emacs, it's just a matter of time. So, technically, it's impossible to capture all possible features of Emacs, the totality is infinite.

In comparison most other languages are 'closed' - e.g., C is a closed language. Its spec is finite and fixed (C99, C11, C17, etc.). You can genuinely master it: all keywords, all standard library functions, all undefined behaviors, all edge cases. There's a ceiling.

Lisp is unusual, The language itself is a tool for language-building. Lisp is 'open'. There's no canonical "complete" set of what exists. Thus there's never completion or "mastery"