Bryan Willson Berry over at Hotair.tech recently moved into JavaScript development. Although he is a longtime Emacs user, he didn’t like the JavaScript support in Emacs so he moved to VSCode. VSCode is the new editor hotness, of course, so I was interested in what he had to say. I know a lot n00bs are drawn to VSCode but I wanted the opinion of someone who had experience with a serious editor.
Berry found that VSCode is an excellent editor and that it was especially good for JavaScript programming. He also found that although VSCode was better than Emacs for JavaScript, Emacs was better at almost everything else. That and the fact that he used Emacs key bindings in all his applications and therefore had serious muscle memory issues—See? I’m not the only one—caused him to move back to Emacs.
Happily, he was able to find some tools that helped with his JavaScript programming so the story has a happy ending. He still believes that VSCode is a superior for editing JavaScript but that Emacs is better in so many other ways that it makes sense to stick with it.
It’s always pleasant to have one’s biases confirmed, of course, so we Emacers probably shouldn’t read too much into Berry’s experience. Still, that experience does confirm my preconceived notion that while other editors may do this or that better, all-in-all, you can’t beat Emacs. But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?