Bram's passing and the split into basically two code bases (Vim, Neovim) and three customization languages pushed me over to Emacs. I switched back and forth for years, as many others do, but I didn't want to deal with having to use one or the other depending on scripting language.
Yes to all perusers about to make some holy war comment or crack a long-dead joke about editors, please don't. Most of us out there are happy you've found peace or joy with your editor of choice.
Keep the holy war dead and let people decide for themselves what their editor should be. I use Emacs but I have many colleagues who use Neovim and we all are very supportive of each other.
I certainly did not intend to ignite any flamewar. IMO both Emacs and (Neo)Vi(m) are fine editors. I wish more people would accept other people's right to have a personal preference.
My choice of Emacs was based on what I see as a fragmenting of (Neo)Vi(m) ecosystem. When writing extensions, I was uncomfortable with a "which of the three languages do I use" decision. The only common language is old Vimscript, and both forks are moving on from it and neither seems willing to support the other fork's preferred language.
That's their right, to be sure. It's just a deal breaker for me.
I'm not the person you asked but I chose Emacs over VSC because it's just a better fit for a lot of things for me. I do think the telemetry Microsoft harvests through VSC is an issue to consider. While it is "just" metadata and no file content, they're getting your entire project structure down to file extensions. I don't see why I would want Microsoft to know what I'm working on. Anyway, the key point for me was ORG mode and that plugins for Go and C++ suck(ed?) in VSC. There are other things, the intellisense is slow, the vim plugin is terrible, the constant Microsoft product pushes are annoying, there is no Magit and so on.
I think it's important to say that I don't dislike VSC as such at this point. Because I probably made it sound like I think it's terrible. I don't I think it's ok. I didn't mind using it for Typescript as an example. Over all I think it's average at best. I get why people use it, it's easy to setup. It's easy to share configurations and so on. I probably would have gone from vim to neovim if it wasn't for doom emacs though.
I think the major advantage both emacs and vim have though is that they're always good. A lot of VSC users are now switching to Zed and that hamsterwheel will go on and on. With vim or emacs you'll never really have to change anything.
I’ve gone from vim to vsc, and now to sublime. Sublime has a nice plugin ecosystem and is in python as well, and most importantly has LSP support written by the authors. It also is wayyyyy faster than VSC now; basically as fast as VIM, but has a better UI and I have vim keyboard integration.
Pretty much the reasons I don't care about VSC. Sensible telemetry is not an issue for me, but pushing electron while there are much more performant solutions is one. I'm much more amenable to the Emacs and Vim's plugin/package solutions than VSC. And they're extraordinary stable.
I’m also unease about the open-source-but-not-really VSCode situation. I don’t know how useful an editor you can build from the available source, which is enough for me to not consider it seriously. I’ve been bitten before.
> Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.
Vim (used to be?) insanely much faster on large files, it’s already installed everywhere, it has built-in highlights for all languages under the sun, configuration is easier to sync around (in my opinion).
Tangent: Despite the misleadingly similar naming, Visual Studio and VSCode are two completely different MS products. I too use VSCode for most of my programming these days, but since I don't currently program for Win32 or UWP or .NET, I haven't seen a reason to install Visual Studio even though I have a Windows machine and they have a zero-cost Community Edition.
I'm familiar with Visual Studio (in my professional persona) and Code. Too many dials and knobs and displays. Telemetry is not a huge issue for me, but I understand why it bothers some people.
I had been jumping back and forth between Vim and Emacs for several years in my hobbyist persona for years. When in hobbyist mode, I prefer to avoid anything that reminds me of my professional mode.
VS and Code are noisy and intrusive. Emacs and Vim (and Neovim) are not.
[edit: grammar]