IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

This, most people that try and use these legacy editors spend most of their time configuring it get it to be as good as vs code and usually fail. A lot of wasted time and frustration when one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work. I do use vim for quick editing of files in the terminal but never for serious work.

Not sure where you get "most" from. Personally I've found the exact opposite: Despite having been forced by work constraints to use most major IDE platforms at one point or another, sometimes for years at a time, I always come back to emacs with great relief and find it better in pretty much every way. I know better than to assume my experience is that of "most" people, though.

The data shows VS Code is used by double digit % of developers, whereas Emacs is less than 1%, I think that qualifies for most.

> one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work

I use over 300 hundred packages in my Emacs setup. I honestly not sure if I can install even half of that number of VSCode extensions and expect it to still run smoothly, maybe people do that, I just don't know.

They are called "packages" and not "extensions" for a reason - an extension that e.g., ships with a browser has limitations. In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another - in VSCode they have to be explicitly exposed via public API, must be activated in order, they need to be aware of their extension IDs, there's no discovery mechanism - in Elisp, I don't have to deal with any of that.

in Emacs I can explore, modify and bend the source code of any package - built-in or third-party. I can do it in a way that is simply impossible anywhere else. I can granularly change selected behavior of any command without having to rewrite it fully.

That "just works™" part I don't ever buy it - all software is faulty by nature. In Emacs, when something fails - I know exactly how to troubleshoot it, to the specific line in the specific package code; I can profile; debug and trace it. I can modify code in question in a scratch buffer and immediately check how it affects things. Not only I don't have to restart anything, I don't even have to save that code anywhere.

You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing - for what the most "modern" alternatives simply have no answers.

I agree, Emacs is not for the faint-hearted - many people (maybe most) lack the patience required to grok it. Yet make no mistake, those who have tamed this beast are not staying in it simply because "they don't know any better". They know - something better is yet to be made, if ever. VSCode is great, yet still not better.

Learning Emacs has liberated me from experiencing tool-FOMO ever again - I can switch to VSCode without abandoning Emacs, and I can even probably figure a way to control one from another if I get annoyed enough; I just never found a pragmatic reason to use VSCode more. So really, I have zero envy or crave to even become a full-time VSCode user; if anything, I might be forced into it by circumstances, but that's a different story.

That's not the point - McDonald's has 40000 joints - the most popular restaurant in the world. Still doesn't make it the best food option.

Yes, Emacs is not popular, but if you look deeper, you may find unsurprisingly that most Emacs coders are strong developers. That correlation isn't coincidental - you don't stick with Emacs unless you're willing to learn; it effectively teaches you about Lisp, extensibility, and programming in general.

Yet, they are not talking about general popularity of editors among devs, but about people who ever tried Emacs - the argument is that the majority of them try, fail and abandon it. For which obviously there's no polemical (or otherwise) data points.

I've installed emacs now on ArchLinux Wayland system and its window refuses to resize (on purely default settings), and freezes the contents until I move it. Very refreshing indeed.

I bet this is some kind of a known issue, but that just reinforces my original point above.

edit: yeah, here it is: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509871

I mean, how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?

> I've installed emacs now on

I never had what you describe. The variability there could be almost random - which version of Emacs you're installing? How are you installing it? Are you trying to build it from source? What renderer are you using - there are several: Lucid, Motif, GTK, NS, W32, Haiku, Android, Cairo, Pgtk. Perhaps it's installing different renderer instead of using pgtk. Maybe it's not a bug with Emacs but with the package that bundles it for your distro?

> how it's not an Emacs issue if it only happens with emacs?

It does seem to be an Emacs issue. But it is a specific issue that happens on the combination of your hardware and your OS configuration.

Yes, I'm always having "special" problems. It's probably due to the fact that I jump around platforms a lot between Linux, macOS and Windows, mixed GUI and ssh.

For example, macOS emacs always starting at the bottom of the window stack instead of the top. macOS emacs having different font notation than Linux emacs, so maintaining common config is hard. Terminal emacs -nw having its own set of rules, and M-x needs to be addressed with ESC x. Etc, etc.

> In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another

You say like it's some kind of feature, but for me it sounds like a potential for name clash, and using private API which is prone to change/break.

> You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing

The thing is that is was VSCode which has brought us LSP, not "emacs hackers". It was VSCode which has brought us LLM Agent mode. All editors are catching up to VSCode, not the other way around.

LSP, LLM, ssh/docker/podman remote development, what's the Emacs answer to those? (I mean, nowadays vim+emacs have their own LSP clients built-in, years after VSCode)

Yeah, I admit, fair complaints. Emacs can be tricky to render things exactly how you like - I use it on Mac, Linux, GUI and terminal and do have different semantics for each.

The tradeoff is that Emacs does let you handle it all - you're not forced to accept platform defaults like in some editors. Most editors have their UI/behavior largely baked in by the platform. You can customize colors and keybindings, but the fundamentals - window management, font rendering, how system keys work, terminal integration - are mostly dictated by whether you're on Mac, Windows, or Linux.

So when you have mac Emacs behaving differently than Linux Emacs, it's not because the software forced you into that corner - it's because the underlying systems are different and Emacs exposes that difference rather than hiding it behind a unified abstraction layer.

Emacs gives you the rope to make things consistent across platforms, but also the rope to hang yourself. Other editors pre-tie the knot for you.

> You say like it's some kind of feature

Oh, you just have no idea. It feels absolutely empowering and immensely liberating to have access to EVERY single line of code running and affecting your system editor. Whenever I need to solve a problem, I don't need to ask permissions, send PRs, dig through API documentation, google for answers, yell at LLM for not giving me answers - I can modify any behavior of any function on the fly and just move on. All that "it just works™" promise of other editors quickly evaporates when I, as a programmer, feel out of control of whatever happens on MY computer. Sure, yes, there's always a possibility that my "stupid hacks" just break for no apparent reason. Except, it rarely happens in practice, and when it does, I know how to quickly fix or put a workaround, because I precisely can pinpoint the exact line of code. Last time when something broke and it took me more than ten minutes to figure it out was about two years ago - the combination of multiple upstream updates and my lousy customization on top confused me for some time - it's all about trade offs, I'm happy to spend 15 minutes once every few years to fix some shit, if that gets me complete and total control over my environment.

I'm a hacker, not a florist - I want precision and complete transparency, not pretty buttons. I don't want any magic - I can't trust some extension to "just work" on a button click, without precisely knowing what it installs, where, and to what extent.

> what's the Emacs answer to those?

Ah, just like I said before, you're talking about things as if you're staring at the surface of the calm water of a lake. Except for an ocasional splash, it may seem lifeless to you, yet you don't have the faintest idea of its depths or what lies beneath.

There's currently an implosion of different LLM packages for Emacs - gptel, gptel-agent, ECA, agent-shell, claude-code, claude-code-ide, monet, claude-repl - and numerous others I haven't even heard of, these are just off the top of my head.

Emacs community may not be big enough and may lack incentives to constantly innovate, but they have no problem borrowing ideas from other places.

> All editors are catching up to VSCode

Wake me up when they figure out things like indirect buffers and executable source blocks in different PLs that can pipe data into one another, or when someone uses VSCode to control their window manager. Or when I can use literate programming to manage my dotfiles. And I haven't even gotten to the REPL part, even with Joyride it still falls short - there's no "I can hook to everything and redefine anything" in Code.

I'd prefer Emacs Lisp had Common Lisp style packages (with namespaces and exports), but in practice it's not much of a problem. Emacs is intended to be programmed by its users, so you don't have "private APIs" in the same way proprietary systems do. Actually internal functions and variables are usually marked with naming conventions these days.

LSP is a great thing to have, but it's actually much less capable than something like SLIME. If you've used SLIME, you'll see there's no comparison. LSP is a lot better than the nonsense I had to go through to get Java completions in the early 2000s, and I'm thankful to have it.