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IDEmacs: A Visual Studio Code clone for Emacs

(codeberg.org)
301 points nogajun | 4 comments | 16 Nov 25 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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imiric ◴[16 Nov 25 11:09 UTC] No.45944188[source]▶
This is great to see, and I'm sure it will nudge some people to give Emacs a try who wouldn't have otherwise.

I've been using Emacs with a custom configuration for many years now, but when I needed a good IDE for working with modern frontend stacks about a year ago, I decided to give VSCodium a try, since the TS/LSP integration wasn't that great in Emacs. And funnily enough, I did the reverse of what this project does: I tried to make VSCodium look and behave more like my Emacs setup.

It turns out that this is incredibly difficult. Decluttering the UI was easy enough; getting my Vim/evil-mode key bindings to work was relatively straightforward, though not perfect; but it was practically impossible to make VSCode work with the concept of buffers, instead of tabs and tab groups.

There are some extensions that emulate this to an extent, but it requires at least one change[1] to work properly that's been ignored for almost 2 years now.

So, that, general jank and unresponsiveness, and the idea of my editor being a web browser with all the security concerns of installing random JS extensions, put me off it for good. I went back to my "inferior" Emacs setup, spent some more time on configuring it for TS, and I think it's not so bad right now. Though I switched projects in the meantime, so it probably needs to be brought up to date again.

Moral of the story: Emacs is life. I'm sorry I ever doubted it. <3

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/204942

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aaravchen ◴[17 Nov 25 06:04 UTC] No.45951188[source]▶
I did exactly the same, though I wasn't an Evil mode user. I quickly found VSCod(e|ium) lacks the internals to even do many of the basic useful things of Emacs.

BTW, if you're an Evil mode user, Zed is probably your better choice. It has more focus on Vim-style keybindings.

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1. hollerith ◴[17 Nov 25 06:18 UTC] No.45951234[source]▶
Similar story here. I used vscode for about 3 months for all my editing needs without even having Emacs installed, but returned to Emacs because of how hard it was to learn how to modify vscode (I'm not a web dev) compared to modifying Emacs and because of a vague impression that vscode is slower in responding to my inputs.
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2. aaravchen ◴[17 Nov 25 17:51 UTC] No.45956025[source]▶
It's definitely slower when doing any intensive background activities that Emacs would normally offload. But I've found VSCode has features readily available as one-click installs that are very difficult and convoluted to setup in Emacs. For some of those you end up either settling for less-ideal tools in Emacs, or because you're not an expert in the specifics of the tool being integrated, you end up with a much less optimized integration. And in either case you can actually end up with a net-worse performance in Emacs, even though the VSCode core is in a far less performant language than Emacs.
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3. karthink ◴[17 Nov 25 18:02 UTC] No.45956133[source]▶
> It's definitely slower when doing any intensive background activities that Emacs would normally offload.

Emacs is single threaded and can't offload any elisp code. Even the stuff it can offload as background OS processes report in to the main loop and share time with editing, so a chatty background process can and does frequently lock up Emacs. So I'm surprised that VSCode, whose runtime is better suited to async jobs, ever feels slower than Emacs.

4. hollerith ◴[18 Nov 25 08:20 UTC] No.45962665[source]▶
I actually agree with that. I should have added a qualifier to my previous comment (grandparent), namely, I use Emacs mainly for things other than programming, and if I ever start programming full-time in a language other than Lisp, then, yeah, (for the reasons you give) I'd probably use vscode instead of Emacs to do that.

I use Emacs for managing files (with Dired) running shell commands, bookkeeping, keeping notes and chatting with LLM services.