I recently came across a truly awful post to the Emacs subreddit. It wasn’t the post itself; it’s what it revealed. The post asked how to counter FUD from users of the bling-centric editors that Emacs was old technology that couldn’t hope to compete with “modern” editors such as VS Code and Jetbrains. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. As keepers of the faith, it’s our duty to counter and shutdown that nonsense whenever it raises its head.
Rather, it was the backstory that was disturbing. The story is about his old company and a friend who is still there. That company has recently decreed that all developers have to use VS Code: it’s the new company standard.
There’s nothing wrong with VS Code, of course, although users may want to think twice before committing. The problem is telling developers they have to use VS Code. Can you imagine trying to tell a surgeon they had to use a certain brand of scalpel? You’d be told to go pound sound before you could draw your next breath.
I’ve told the story before about the clueless technical manager who proposed such a mandate at a company I once worked at. I and the other senior developer were able to explain the facts of life and aborted the disaster before it occurred. As you all know, we here at the Irreal bunker are all in on Emacs but we believe that choosing an editor is like choosing a mate: others may disagree with your choice but it’s none of their business. More succinctly: choose whatever editor works best for you. Everyone else should butt out.
Mandates like this are always imposed by people who don’t actually do development. They imagine they’re encouraging a shared development culture but what they’re actually encouraging is a mass exodus. I don’t know about you but I’d be out the door in an instant if some suit presumed to tell me what editor to use.