I’m not familiar with magit but from a quick skim of the “visual walkthrough” I think you can get most if not all of the functionality either built in to vscode or with the free “git lens” plugin, one of the most popular in the extension directory.
Literally anything you can do in emcas there is an extension for or at least one in dev. Vscode will outgrow emcas given its critics mass and momentum.
I keep reading on Hackernews and elsewhere that VSCode will solve world hunger. So I try it. And after a week or two, I realize what I'm missing from Emacs and go back. This has happened several times, because I keep thinking, maybe I didn't give VSCode the fair shake it deserves. But VSCode never lives up to the hype, is not compellingly better than Emacs such that I want to switch, and is in some ways worse. Emacs gives me a computing environment that I can shape and mold to my needs quickly and directly, as I use it. VSCode is extensible; for Emacs, extending it is an integral part of working with it.
What's more, VSCode is not even open source. It's more like "open core". The editor core is under an MIT license, but the binary you download from code.visualstudio.com is proprietary, as are many of the most useful plug-ins. Source ports like VSCodium are not first-class in the extension ecosystem.
Emacs, by contrast, is the next thing beyond open source: it's software that describes itself. Whether that be the tutorial for new users, built-in documentation for every function or variable, or the ability to M-. into the implementation, whether in Lisp or C, of any function, the guts of Emacs are always at your fingertips. I get the feeling RMS intended "free software" to be a baseline, a bare minimum for protecting the user's freedom. To truly emancipate the user, something like Emacs where the software actively aids the user's understanding of its internals, is needed.
I'm not a heavy VSCode user, so I don't know much about its plugin ecosystem. I'm asking the question below sincerely, not to start an argument.
Is there a plugin in VSCode to:
1. Read, write and send emails?
2. Have an org mode like system where I can do TODOs, as well as link to things in other aspects of VSCode (e.g. link to an email - something I do routinely)?
2b In general, how easy is it to interconnect the different plugins? If I have a plugin to handle email, and another to do TODOs, can I quickly write something that will read an email, and then go and add a TODO in the appropriate section of some document based on the contents of that email?
You've selected some use cases designed to show that VSCode is inferior to emacs. What you failed to realize is that your use cases are invalid for probably a vast majority of people:
> Read, write and send emails
I prefer to do that in a dedicated app that actually knows how to deal with emails, and not from inside my text editor/IDE
> can I quickly write something that will read an email, and then go and add a TODO in the appropriate section of some document based on the contents of that email
I tend to prefer not to spend my time programming things, but, you know, enjoy life.
If I need a todo from an email, I'll copy paste it to an app that, for example, syncs to my phone
The previous user said that you can do "literally anything" in VSCode that you can do in Emacs, I think these examples were chosen to prove that statement wrong. It doesn't mean that Emacs is better for everyone.
Because I need a file manager? I can give you an example of a time where I needed to examine some files, and depending on what I saw, with a keystroke make notes in a text file with links to those files, but that's secondary to the topic. The simpler answer is that I need things like file managers and window managers, and Emacs is both. Viewing Emacs as a text editor is a misconception you seem to have.
My question was whether there are plugins for VSCode to do any of these. You did not address that at all. Your comment is noise in this thread.
The question is will it grow in the right direction? Org-mode, magit and a pure terminal interface (can run on remotes through an SSH sesion) are still missing. Still love the ergonomics of vs code.
You are asking the right question, but it applies to your comment equally well.
> For 99% of users, org-mode, magit and a pure terminal interface are not hard requirements.
You are narrowly picking the set of users to suit your comment. For 99% of users, code completion, syntax highlighting, etc are not requirements either, because 99% of users do not program.
In retrospect, it should be obvious that Emacs users are heavily weighted towards using org mode, because that's part of Emacs's value proposition. It makes sense that most VSCode users do not need/want org mode, because otherwise they'd be using Emacs, and not VSCode.
In almost every thread about Emacs, I always find the comparisons with VSCode amusing, given that the two programs serve very different purposes. The bulk of my Emacs usage has nothing to do with coding, so I personally don't see the value of comparing it with VSCode, and pointing out that VSCode is better is sort of irrelevant. Of course, this being HN, there is a programming bias. But it's the equivalent of saying "mplayer sucks because it cannot do video editing as good as some video editing tool."[1] It's great that you have found a good video editing tool, but that tool doesn't do much of what I use mplayer for.
[1] mplayer has extremely rudimentary video editing capabilities,
Genuine question: is there one for regional undo? That is, can you select an arbitrary region of a file and step back through modifications that have been made to that section of the file only?
This is just one "killer feature" of Emacs for me that I have yet to come across in other editors/IDEs (maybe I just haven't looked hard enough!)
“Critics mass” of whom? VS Code is very disappointing, given the hype. Can you give an example of something in the VS Code ecosystem that can impress an Emacs user enough to switch, beyond chrome?
