<story><title>Emacs: The most successful malleable system</title><url>https://malleable.systems/blog/2020/04/01/the-most-successful-malleable-system-in-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patrec</author><text>Even if you are an elisp expert, emacs is by now quite inferior to VSCode for most things; what you get out of the box with vscode beats laborious customization by expert hands in emacs 9 times out of 10. Emacs still does some fundamentals better (undo), can be used in a terminal and, if you avoid bloatware like spacemacs, also offers better performance. If one is willing to ignore the spyware and proprietary component aspects, vs code by now is a better choice even for most power users, IMO.</text></item><item><author>dmortin</author><text>The defaults. They aren&amp;#x27;t very good, IMO. Many users don&amp;#x27;t want to spend time with customizing, they want a system which works instantly with language plugins, and so on. VSCode does a very good job at that.&lt;p&gt;Emacs is for people who like to deeply personalize their editors. That&amp;#x27;s why I use it. But it takes time and learning elisp and many people are unwilling to do that.</text></item><item><author>svat</author><text>While I am a fan of Emacs (IMO any one of Org, AUCTeX, or Magit is in itself a worthwhile reason to use Emacs, though of course the ease of customizing nearly anything with just a few lines of elisp is the main comfort), I think it&amp;#x27;s also worth looking at lessons from the &lt;i&gt;failures&lt;/i&gt; of Emacs — what prevents or prevented Emacs from being even more successful? (As the post says, Emacs&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;success&amp;quot; is only when considered relative to other malleable systems.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agentultra</author><text>&amp;gt; Even if you are an elisp expert, emacs is by now quite inferior to VSCode for most things&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been impressed that VSCode has managed to implement features Emacs has had for decades. One day it might catch up as long as MS keeps pumping millions into its development.&lt;p&gt;For me though it&amp;#x27;s still not even close.</text></comment>
<story><title>Emacs: The most successful malleable system</title><url>https://malleable.systems/blog/2020/04/01/the-most-successful-malleable-system-in-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patrec</author><text>Even if you are an elisp expert, emacs is by now quite inferior to VSCode for most things; what you get out of the box with vscode beats laborious customization by expert hands in emacs 9 times out of 10. Emacs still does some fundamentals better (undo), can be used in a terminal and, if you avoid bloatware like spacemacs, also offers better performance. If one is willing to ignore the spyware and proprietary component aspects, vs code by now is a better choice even for most power users, IMO.</text></item><item><author>dmortin</author><text>The defaults. They aren&amp;#x27;t very good, IMO. Many users don&amp;#x27;t want to spend time with customizing, they want a system which works instantly with language plugins, and so on. VSCode does a very good job at that.&lt;p&gt;Emacs is for people who like to deeply personalize their editors. That&amp;#x27;s why I use it. But it takes time and learning elisp and many people are unwilling to do that.</text></item><item><author>svat</author><text>While I am a fan of Emacs (IMO any one of Org, AUCTeX, or Magit is in itself a worthwhile reason to use Emacs, though of course the ease of customizing nearly anything with just a few lines of elisp is the main comfort), I think it&amp;#x27;s also worth looking at lessons from the &lt;i&gt;failures&lt;/i&gt; of Emacs — what prevents or prevented Emacs from being even more successful? (As the post says, Emacs&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;success&amp;quot; is only when considered relative to other malleable systems.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taeric</author><text>I find this hard to believe.  Not that you may like one over the other, but that one is superior.&lt;p&gt;Getting used to tramp, magit, and eshell has effectively made it so I will be in Emacs forever.  Adding in developer modes helps.  Same for org.  But really it is the seamless eshell ability to &amp;quot;cd &amp;#x2F;ssh:mycomputer&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot; and not with about reconnecting a terminal over and over that is something I don&amp;#x27;t want to leave.</text></comment>