I use emacs daily (with vim keybindings of course), but I completely understand why vscode is so popular. It's extremely easy to get started with, has features galore, and sane defaults. Emacs takes much more effort to get productive with, although this is improving with each release.

Because very few people actually care about the things that emacs has to offer.

Tools like VS Code do the job well enough for the majority of people, with just enough configurability.

Emacs has a similar problem to Lisp: Infinite configurability and expandability (plus the lack of a "blessed set" standard that people actually like enough to use out-of-the-box) means that everyone's environment and tooling ends up becoming incompatible with each other.

If you work on web tech (and who doesn’t these days?) VS Code has the advantage of using the same tech stack you’re already familiar with. If you need to debug a problem, just open devtools. If you want to run a performance profile, do the same. If you want to fix a bug in the extension you’re using, just open a PR and fix it.

It is a very flexible system and still quite fast and easy to configure. I’ve been trying Zed and WebStorm looking for better alternatives, but it turns out they have their own problems. Zed isn’t nearly as configurable, WebStorm’s config system is an absolute nightmare (xml for days - and constantly changing, mingling actual config with transient state).

People complain that VS Code is slow; perhaps on some metrics and perhaps it is slower than a much less featured system like sublime. But I don’t think it is meaningfully slower in practice than Zed, and they make a lot of compromises to get that edge.

That’s easy. Because if they accept that emacs is good enough, they have to then accept that probably whatever thing they’re building is almost certainly worthless.

26 different browsers all based on Chromium, 127 different “observability platforms” etc.

So so much redundant rehashed stuff. We can’t accept that though, THIS TIME it’s going to be great and amazing and we’ll get a huge investment and sold to a huge company for millions.

I’m not suggesting that it hasn’t been a huge leap in computing and software in the last 40 years.

But we need to have faith in new being better to keep going. That’s why the new hotness is always so popular.

90% of software is just new people not learning from the past and making/using some new thing.

Get off my lawn.