IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

Whoever thinks that VSCode does not have any learning curve or is somehow magically easy, needs to take a reality check, that thing is overwhelming with all its popups, hovers, sidebars etc. beyond all reason when you first run it (and later too). I'm an Emacs user and I don't in any way support the notion it's somehow easy or intuitively workable, it's most definitely not and never has been. I just think that VSCode is not it either, it's just the more popular tool right now.

Every piece of software that’s effectively a professional workbench (IDEs, DAWs, video editing, etc) is going to have some complexity.

I can’t imagine the argument that vscode’s level of complexity is even in the same order of magnitude as vim or eMacs though. A 2 minute tutorial or half an hour or fiddling will get you sorted with vscode, I needed a full ebook for neovim.

VSCode rely on familiar pattern and UX to let you get started easily. But out of the box, it's pretty much notepad level. Vim and Emacs start from the premises that you need powerful tools. And they give them to you alongside the possibility to integrate external tools easily with the editor workflow. With VSCode any integration needs to be a full project. With emacs and vims, it's a few lines of config.

What kind of integration is a full project? Integrating language support for example is usually just heading to the plugins section, searching for the language and clicking install on the most mainstream result.

My config for vscode is just like 5 lines to make keyboard travel between panes a bit more vim like, other than that I never needed to change much from defaults.

For neovim the work to make it ide-like is a large list of plugins and its integrations, large enough that I’m comfortable outsourcing the consistency to a distro (lazyvim).

Yeah, now see, you need to do that for every programming language, or tool for vscode.

With Lazyvim you get all at once. And you can ignore many plugins if you want,

Sure it's not ide level, but with proper configuration vim/Nvim is much more powerful than vscode. And thanks to Lazyvim, you can set it up faster

but Nvim or vim even without plugins can do many things that vscode can not do. So without plugins vscode is just an editor, while Nvim/vim are powerful utilities