IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

It's more like how to put a modern day car dash over an F16 fighter jet. One has modern expectations and standards everyone is already familiar with but far less power and features, while the other existed before usability was even an idea but has more power and features than even most experts can handle. And in this case (and analogy), you can always slowly remove parts of the interface that hide the more powerful features.

I say this as a 10 year Emacs user who left for VSCode and Zed because I decided I'd rather discover new modern features when they became useful (VSCode/Zed) rather than having to hunt them down when I became too fed up with the status quo and then have to spend weeks figuring out how to get them working (Emacs). That said, I keep itching to go back for some of the power features. If only it weren't a full time job just maintaining a basic emacs config.

> It's more like how to put a modern day car dash over an F16 fighter jet.

Yeah, that's probably a better analogy.

> If only it weren't a full time job just maintaining a basic emacs config.

I've heard that before, and I don't get it. I might spend 20 minutes a month updating my config, but it's really a set it and forget it thing for me. What are people doing that requires so much work?

> What are people doing that requires so much work?

15 years ago I was in the same boat as you.I just had a set it and forget it config. But about 6 years ago I had to start adding addition languages support to my config, and started having to switch machines at work every year or so.

Emacs package manager has always been abysmal at reusing an existing config on a different machine, and always required significant updates to the config for the latest versions of the packages (which frequently have/had breaking changes every coupe years). So it became a config update every year or so, that would take a couple days at minimum.

Then the language support had to be addressed. With the couple days of updating every year or so, I start eying what other solutions are providing, especially since I was delving into new areas and toolsets. A few years ago simple dumb syntax and identifier fuzzy completion stopped being sufficient and table stakes became intelligent context-aware autocomomplete. Emacs setup for that was incredibly bad and has been extremely poor for years up until very recently. Only in the last year-ish has actual working LSP support finally been added and isn't bolted into a system that can barely cope. That means there was literally a gap of a few years where Emacs at best failed to meet the minimim to even be considered as a primary editor. Even still, the setup is very manual to get even the most basic integration.

A similar rush of features is now pretty normal in editors, and Emacs is simply not keeping up. It's now a question of trade offs: how much do I want those crazy editing features of Emacs, and how many one-click support and integration features that are standard across almost all competitors am I willing to go without or spend hours every couple weeks setting up?