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).

With emacs, you can just use “customize” (for options) and “M-x” (for commands) and never care about anything else. Yes, it’s not as visible as vscode, but it’s very much the same thing.

But once you learn elisp, then you have the power of a full VM at your disposal and not wait for a plugins to exist and hopefully implement your workflow. And adhoc integration (like having ticket number in comments be clickable) is not easily feasible.