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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

That might be true, but I found it easy 30 years ago to learn how to modify Emacs, but spent 100s of hours trying to learn how to exert a similar level of control over VSCode, and never saw any significant signs I was getting close to my goal.

Profession web developers might have a different experience.

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I agree with you that extending Visual Studio Code is a quite different experience, more akin to pulling teeth or writing COM controls in C++ in the 90s than to extending Emacs, which can be done live in your editing session as you work.

But. Seventy-five percent of developers use Visual Studio Code, with most of the rest being vim, neovim, or JetBrains holdouts. All of the brainpower for extensions and tooling integration is going into Visual Studio Code, not Emacs. Soon, Emacs will simply be left behind.

Emacs doesn’t have to be the most popular editor in order to find contributors. It is under active development and I don’t see signs that it would be left behind anytime soon.

While having the largest community is certainly a benefit to an IDE, it's not a death blow to the others. JetBrains is a paid editor so they have more resources per-user than an free editor. Also many tools are relatively easy to integrate or follow a standard (such as the language server protocol or dev containers) so all editors can benefit from those ecosystems.

It's not a walled garden like the mobile OSs work in building up tooling for one editor can transfer over to others.

> Seventy-five percent of developers use Visual Studio Code

75% of what developers? Hobbyists? Students? Professionals? Because last one is the only relevant metric as all editors strive towards it.

Professionals, from Stack Overflow's user surveys.

That’s 75% using VSCode, not exclusively using VSCode. Combining all IntelliJ forks will yield at least half of the market and given how heavyweight they are, it’s reasonable to assume that VSCode is used as a “dumber”, “faster” for quick edits while actual work is done in “real” IDEs (that’s what I and my colleagues do anyway, I personally know at least 7 people with setup like that).

I'm definitely one of those vim holdouts, even though vscode vim support is pretty good. If vscode ever supports ctrl-z to jump into a full terminal and fg to jump back into editor mode, then I'll definitely convert.

VS Code certainly can be configured to have a keyboard shortcut to switch to a terminal and another shortcut to switch back and/or close the terminal. In fact probably every popular editor with a built-in terminal can do that.

> pulling teeth or writing COM controls in C++ in the 90s

You can have the same experience today, if you feel like authoring COM in C++/WinRT for WinUI 3.0.

Quite modern. /s

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