Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I installed the stable (not Electron version) and kicked the tires. Looks like a fun project if you want turtles all the way down Common Lisp.

I admit that even for Common Lisp, I usually just use VSCode to edit with a separate repl (I always define a function (ll) that reloads the code I am working on so this is not inconvenient). Off topic but I now also mostly use VSCode for Haskell, Python, and Julia. Still love Emacs, just don’t use it as my main driver anymore.

View on HN

I'm surprised that emacs users and some vim users too are switching to VSCode. Assuming I am not RAM constrained (I have "only" 6 but my system never lags- I have 0 chromium engines on my system), what is your workflow and what does VSCode do better?

Sensible defaults are a big part of it for me. Using VSCode means that I spend very little time configuring the editor, or setting up extensions.

Why would you spend time doing anything? You just do it once and commit it to github? That's how my vimrc lives.

Does doing it once not take time? I usually get bored halfway through and switch to an editor that works properly out of the box.

In fact, of course, doing it once is a pipe dream. Everything with vim and emacs 90% works, and you can spend infinite amounts of time chasing the other 10%.

As far as Common Lisp goes, you could just install the Portacle distribution of emacs. This is essentially a fully-geared up CL IDE, including all the favourite emacs extensions for development (flycheck, company, paredit, magit, etc) and even SBCL and git!

It provides a single user.el file for user-specific configuration, but as it stands it is an excellent "emacs with great defaults".

For me it was TypeScript. I had terrible slowdowns in vim for whatever reason (was using a couple different plugins, and maybe things have improved since then), and VSCode is hands down the best TypeScript editor. I then found it to be a nicer experience for JS in general as well as C/C++.

I still use vim often but since I'm not a vim power user, the vim emulation mode/plugin for any particular editor is generally good enough for me.

vim works well with tmux on servers, with minimal config or the one in git, but i have a custom hacker keyboard layout, so maybe that plays indirectly. For me GUIs eliminate themselves from some of the work that's better done on a server, that said i tried vscode one day and it was pretty cool

What makes you work in 4 different languages?

More than 4 languages. I also like 3 Scheme dialects and also Ruby.

I am getting interested in Swift also since the Swift ‘turtles all the way down’ version of TensorFlow is under development and looks good.

But the keybindings...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com