i still use emacs everyday, with the native UI. but i love the idea of this project. Personaly i never get used to the UI of VSCode. seems so hard to understand because in emacs you deal with functions not UI buttons.
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I prefer both Vim and Emacs over VSCode, but I teach intro programming at a university and use VSCode in the lectures.
VSCode is actually quite decent if you use it as a keyboard-driven thing with a distraction-free interface. By the former, I mean that Cmd-Shift-P does the same as Emacs’ M-x, and from the keybinding hints you quickly learn any recurring useful bindings (or can change them under Cmd-K Cmd-S when they feel bad). By the latter, I mean that nearly every UI element can be disabled (activity bar, tab bar, status bar, scroll bar, most buttons, indent guides, gutters, etc.) and if you spend 30min disabling the fluff it looks as minimal as Emacs. You don’t really need the UI elements if you learn Cmd-Shift-P and basic keybindings, which as an Emacs user you’ll pick up in a week.
Not trying to sell VSCode here, as I said I don’t prefer it myself. I really tried to switch some times, but I don’t like the Microsoft monoculture nor the importance of proprietary plugins (like remote development and pylance), and an Electron app usually has some weirdness when it comes to font rendering, UI bugs, etc. compared to native or terminal apps.
But if you have to use it, it’s actually not bad if you approach it in the same way you’d approach Emacs: Call functions with Cmd-Shift-P (can rebind to M-x if you want), and invoke more common functions via keybindings instead of UI elements.
Only superficially, but not even close in practice. In M-x you can run recursive commands; you have history; you can search through history back and forth; you can scroll the buffer, shrink and widen windows, browse files - all without leaving the M-x menu; you can yank current command or insert directly into the buffer; select multiple commands; act on them; inspect the source; enable tracing; - these are all built-in features.
With some packages you can - export the commands list into a fully functional buffer from which you can still run the commands; you can cycle annotations - show description of the command or keys they bind to; you can display commands in a grid or temporarily flatten the menu for unobtrusive view. You can enable full vim-mode in it - in Emacs, M-x is a fully functional buffer, not some dummy input - I can call the LLM and ask it to find me a command while it's still active.