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 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.