Emacs vs Visual Studio Code

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir.

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza).

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed.

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface.

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t.

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties.

Licensed under GNU GPL.

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer.

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files.

Evil mode emulates vim behaviors within Emacs. It enables Vi users to move inside the Emacs universe.

Emacs can select rectangularly.

With lisp customization, any behavior of Emacs can be changed. Update with pre-release patch can be also applied without recompiling the whole Emacs.

Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects.

Dynamic word completion.

Advanced planning and publication which can start as a simple list.

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow.

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video.

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system.

Powerful commands, search, and more with the Helm plugin.

Works on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, BSD, and others.

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things.

Emacs is great for everything.

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use.

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell.

Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.

There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript.

Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.

VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.

You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered.

There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal.

For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well.

There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily.

Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript.

Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse.

ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style.

Released under the MIT License.

It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes.

Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable.

VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created.

The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows.

All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need.

The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support.

Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.

It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option.

It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it.

These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed.