Haha, yeah, sure, but of course, no! Similar shit has been said so many times since 1990s. Yet both Vim and Emacs still have vibrant communities, have dedicated conferences, they get mentioned almost every week - here on HN, and every day on Reddit.
Emacs, in experienced hands, absolutely kicks everything out of the ballpark; it's just hands-down the best tool with unmatched text manipulation capabilities. Anyone who says otherwise simply is unaware what you can do in Emacs.
Can anyone in the grand community of VSCode users claim to have a workflow that involves:
- Reading a pdf where the colors match the current color scheme? The scheme that automatically adjusts the colors based on time of the day (because Emacs has built-in solar and lunar calendars)?
- Where they do annotate the said pdf in their notes, where you can jump to the places in pdf from the notes and vice-versa? Where you can scroll the pdf, without even having to switch windows, because you're in the middle of typing?
- Where you can open a video and control its playback - pausing and resuming it in place, directly from your editor, whilst typing?
- Where you also extract subtitles and copy some text chunks for your notes? Where you can run LLM to extract summary for your notes of the said transcript?
- Where you can resume the video-playback at some position in the transcript? Where you can watch the video and chunks of the transcript text get automatically highlighted - the karaoke style?
- Where you can simply type 'RFC-xxx' and despite that being a plain text entry, Emacs intelligently recognizes what that is and lets you browse the RFC entry, in-place, without even googling for it? Or similarly have plain-text of e.g., 'myorg/foo#34' and browse that Pull-Request and even perform the review with diffs and everything?
- Speaking of googling, can you type a search query only once and let it run through different places, finding things in Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, GitHub, your browser's history and personal emails? Or any other places, since it's highly configurable?
- Do you use translation, dictionaries, thesaurus, etymology and definition lookup for any words and phrases, in the midst of typing? I have bound "auto-correct previous typo" to a double tap of the comma key - it's super convenient. Can you do something like that in VSCode easily?
- Do you edit code comments and docstrings in the code, treating them as markdown - with all the syntax highlighting, preview, and other perks?
- Do you have embedded LaTeX formulas directly in your notes?
And that's just a tiny fraction of things I personally do in Emacs - it's just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other interesting and highly pragmatic Emacs packages people use for various kinds of tasks. Speaking of packages - my config contains over 300 different Emacs packages, and I still can restart and load it under a second. Can you imagine any VS Code user having installed even half of that many plugins? Would that still be a "workable" environment?
The phishing emails we get at my software dev job for security certification and pen testing pale in comparison to the actual effort being put in by scammers, who coordinate bookings with parcels and random invoices so that they tell a story, always targeting different shifts (almost never the same).