Zameer Ul Haque has an interesting post in which he describes his escape from VSCode. Usually when you see stories like this, they’re about escaping from Vim and moving to Emacs or the other way around. Now that the new hotness is VSCode, we’re seeing a lot of people discover that there are better editors and moving to Vim or Emacs. As I’ve said before, which one you choose depends on what you want from an editor. As I’ve also said before, if you’re a top flight engineer, you probably use one or the other of them.
One of the things about the post that surprised me was that Ul Haque considered Vim and Emacs essentially magic accessible only to Elite. That’s a comforting notion to us Emacers and Vimers, of course, but, really, it’s nonsense. Yes, they have a slightly higher learning curve but that’s mostly because they’re more powerful. If an editor can do more things, it takes longer to learn how to do all those things.
One interesting thing I learned from his post is that there’s a plugin for VSCode that implements the Spacemacs (hence Vim) key sequences. Ul Haque used that to get used to Spacemacs keybindings. Once he felt comfortable with them he moved to Spacemacs and finally to Doom Emacs.
Take a look at his post if you want to see how one man moved from VSCode to the promised land of Emacs.