Item — HN Reader

This article struck a personal chord with me: I bought a new MacBook a week ago and installed minimal software on it, specifically I did not install VSCode and I don’t miss it.

I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup.

VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel happy using Emacs and I only use very minimal LLM integrations with Emacs, preferring to separately running gemini-cli occasionally, or using a variety of LLMs (especially strong local models) with one-shot prompting.

10 comments

Likewise, I feel happy when using Emacs in a way that other editors do not. Emacs was made for a different era of development, with different views on what productive programming looked like. Rider, VSCode, and etc are all post-NetBeans editors and it shows. Editing text buffers isn't the focus so much as refactoring projects is; and agentic AI development slots easily into that refactoring process. With Emacs, it _feels_ purposeful, manual, and dare I say it, artisanal.

Also started using emacs (doom) a couple of months ago, after realizing that jetbrains and vscode are going to be AI-shittified, and there is no turning back.

At this point, I would recommend to every coder worth his salt to just jump to vim/neovim or emacs, these editors will be around for the next 1000 years and you wont need to fight against some BS features and you wont need to switch ever egain. The 1-2 month learning curve is worth it!

I set a calendar appointment for 1000 years in the future to fact check this claim

I was a long time Emacs user, spent way too much of my life in ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I don't use it for anything other than magit any more. I just tried it again, first by upgrading my packages in package.el. Of course, everything is still locked up when I `package-menu-execute` to upgrade packages. I guess in a thousand years it will still be mostly single-threaded, with almost every action locking up the UI thread.

We don't all have

- 40 years experience with Emacs

- the ability to predict that 20 years from when we started we would fall in love with Emacs

- the fortitude of will to overcome the mountainous project that it is to turn Emacs, The text editor "toolkit", into the perfect text editor for you.

You may be surprised how short a path it is to the perfect emacs config for you.

Believe me I have tried. And already have made my config. Took me weeks, and is still no closer to getting to be up to par with what I get with helix out of the box.

It also is just super slow on windows unfortunately.

But one day, one day I'll switch

No one reaches the perfect emacs config. It's an asymptote.

I’ve fallen in love with emacs again now that I can have an LLM tune up my config. I love emacs, I don’t love lisp. Maybe LLMs are helping me with that, too.

But I so happy with my config now. Simplified and modern.

Ha! My elisp is almost non existent, and so I’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude to help me rewrite my perfect setup - and it’s glorious!

I‘ve been happily using Doom Emacs on Linux as VSCode replacement. When I switched to macOS, I found the experience to be rather slow with significant input lag, though. (And yes, I did use native compilation.) Has something changed in that regard, or did you just accept it?

Many Emacs functions are sluggish on my work Mac, but I found out that this is because the Cisco endpoint security software stops and checks every binary that runs, every single Goddamn time, which means that things which shell out, like M-x compile and anything in magit, are noticeably slower.

I had the same issues. I mainly use Doom on my linux machine, but on mac it is distractingly slow. d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus seemed to reduce the lag, but I've had other issues with it, so have gone back to vim.

I'm also a long time emacs user (>15 years) but got tired of the endless config fiddling, with some packages breaking over emacs versions, other packages which were cool at the time slowly getting stale and need to switch to yet another similar incarnation of the same idea. And most of all having to recover the config every time I use a new computer or just connect to a new VM.

I'm building an alternative, and I haven't opened emacs for a month now

I've been Emacsing for 30+ years at this point, but I'm frustrated at its performance in the 21st century.

By which I mean both startup time (yes, I know real Emacs people never leave the editor. I'm Not That Guy) but its single-threadedness leading to painful blocking pauses when using eglot + rust-analyzer, etc.

I bought a new basic laptop last year, with enough RAM, and little do you know, the VS Code did not feel faster on the new device. So last week, when I noticed that Zed for Windows is "stable" now, I've uninstalled VSC.

VS Code is still the better tool (imho) but I can't stand it.

I knew I was right to stick it out with Emacs, despite the world telling me literally everyone was using VS Code now. Emacs bros unite!

Emacs what?? Let's start an editor flame war, under a completely different editor wars :)) Yes i am a VI man.

Just joking, I really mis the org-mode.