There's this response that VSCode is just another editor in the vein of Sublime/BBEdit/Atom, that will be killed by a newer, shinier competitor, while emacs persists. That's a great story—indeed it was told to me by a teacher who proselytized emacs.
But what if you're wrong?
What if VSCode is a massive challenger? For one, no editor has had the backing of a major tech corporation. Sure, XCode and Visual Studio exist, but they were specific to a particular stack. Second, language servers aren't something that can be elisped away. Stuff like multiple cursors are a few elisp lines away, but real, semantic knowledge of code is a lot harder to replicate. Emacs has language server clients but man they're annoying.
I'm an emacs user under the age of 40. All the other ones I know stem from this one teacher who taught emacs. I'm not sure how many more there are. Emacs is a fun editor and I'll certainly use the keybindings wherever I go, but it baffles me that people can look at emacs and think it's accessible at all to beginners.
Go ahead, try downloading emacs (have a fun time figuring out which version to download for macOS) and using it without any config. It's terrible. Bland, plain white, looking like it's from the 70's. M-x just dumps you into an empty text box with no help. Navigating directories involves typing out entire directory names. Getting basic stuff like goto definition requires either setting up eglot/lsp-mode or ggtags.
Emacs is great if you invest the time, but it's getting less and less clear whether the investment is worth it. To return to my question, what if you're wrong? Emacs will die. This wouldn't be the worst fate. It's had a long, respectable life. But I'd miss it.
> Stuff like multiple cursors are a few elisp lines away...
Last time I tried to get multiple cursors/selections working, it was definitely more than that, and the result was awkward and cumbersome at best. The problem is that everything else is written assuming that there's one cursor and one selection, so you can't really make a multiple cursor system in Emacs that integrates with everything else; it remains a special case.
But what if you're wrong?
What if VSCode is a massive challenger? For one, no editor has had the backing of a major tech corporation. Sure, XCode and Visual Studio exist, but they were specific to a particular stack. Second, language servers aren't something that can be elisped away. Stuff like multiple cursors are a few elisp lines away, but real, semantic knowledge of code is a lot harder to replicate. Emacs has language server clients but man they're annoying.
I'm an emacs user under the age of 40. All the other ones I know stem from this one teacher who taught emacs. I'm not sure how many more there are. Emacs is a fun editor and I'll certainly use the keybindings wherever I go, but it baffles me that people can look at emacs and think it's accessible at all to beginners.
Go ahead, try downloading emacs (have a fun time figuring out which version to download for macOS) and using it without any config. It's terrible. Bland, plain white, looking like it's from the 70's. M-x just dumps you into an empty text box with no help. Navigating directories involves typing out entire directory names. Getting basic stuff like goto definition requires either setting up eglot/lsp-mode or ggtags.
Emacs is great if you invest the time, but it's getting less and less clear whether the investment is worth it. To return to my question, what if you're wrong? Emacs will die. This wouldn't be the worst fate. It's had a long, respectable life. But I'd miss it.