Irreal

I thought we had settled this once and for all but apparently not. Over at the Emacs subreddit, sudhirkhanger asks about VS Code’s extension system as compared to Emacs’. He’s “blown away” at how great the VS Code plugin system is. He’s amazed at the integration and says it’s almost like using a native application.

Many of the comments make the point that VS Code is not really free software with all the problems that that implies but I don’t want discuss that aspect. What I’m interested in is the same thing that sudhirkhanger is: the relative merits of VS Code’s extension system versus what Emacs does instead.

Notice that I didn’t say “Emacs’ extension system”. That’s because Emacs doesn’t have an “extension language” as the term is usually understood. Rather, Emacs is a Lisp machine and that means that you can change or add to the core functionality on the fly. That’s different from being merely “open source”. You don’t have to edit and recompile. You just write some code, evaluate it, and suddenly the editor is doing something different. You’re not restricted to what some extension API allows. Your code has the same status as—and, indeed, is indistinguishable from—the code that ships with Emacs.

The takeaway is that if your insist on comparing VS Code and Emacs please don’t do so from the point of view of the extension system. Emacs doesn’t have one. You simply change or add to the base code without any “by your leave” from the developers. The way you “extend” VS Code and Emacs are not comparable. Your aren’t talking about the same thing anymore than you are when—to invoke a cliche—you compare apples and oranges.

Remember how, when you first started using Emacs, there were all those strange defaults that just didn’t seem right. The worst one, for me, was scrolling. I hated the way the screen would jump when you got near the top or bottom. That feature alone caused me to abandon Emacs more than once.

Of course, like everything in Emacs, that’s configurable but it’s hard for n00bs to know what to do about such things. Sooner or later we all discovered the magic spells to get things more to our liking.

Over at The Emacs Cat, there’s a nice post that shows how to configure things in what many of us consider a saner way. Decent scrolling is covered as is making Emacs Emacs talk UTF-8 exclusively. Both of those took me a long time and a lot of experimentation to get right.

There’s also a section on getting rid of the common annoyances such as having to type “yes” instead of simply “y”, making tabs sane, getting rid of the bell and tool bar, and—for those of you who love controversy—ending sentences with a period and single space.

There’s also a section on some useful modes that you can enable, such as winner-mode, global-hl-line-mode, desktop-save-mode, and help-window-select. I didn’t know about that last one but I’ve frequently been annoyed that I have to switch over to the Help window so it seems useful.

There are a few more useful tweaks that you may or may not want. I found it surprising how closely Emacs Cat’s choices echoed mine. We don’t agree on everything but it’s surprising how much we do agree on. In any event, take a look and see if there’s an answer to a problem you’re having.

Kristoffer Balintona has a nice post on Emacs occur. If you have moderate familiarity with Emacs, you have probably used occur on occasion. I use it all the time but still wasn’t aware of everything it could do.

Happily, Balintona is here to fill in the blanks. The information is all there in the documentation, of course, but it’s easy to miss it when skimming through the doc looking for the information that you need.

The first significant thing is that you can restrict the action of Occur to a specific region of the target buffer. You probably won’t want to do this very often but it’s easy to see how it could be useful. The second significant thing is the number of lines of context.

You can specify how many lines of context before and after the matching regex to include but you can also specify a string in which case what is displayed acts as a replacement string. You certainly won’t need that capability a lot but when you do, it’s perfect.

Take a look at Balintona’s post or the documentation for the details. This is another example of how learning Emacs is a lifelong endeavor. You learn bits and pieces of a certain functionality but later discover that it’s much richer than you believed.