Emacs or VS Code? Why and How I’m Slowly Switching to GNU Emacs

I may have just ended my editor hunt

Photo by Jaye Haych on Unsplash

A while ago, I wrote this article about how I had set up Vim for Python development. Over the last two years, I have made big changes to my dev toolkit:

• I hardly use Python anymore, if not for prototyping in ML.
• I haven’t used vim for a year now, I have used VSCode (and Emacs).

In this article, I’d like to talk about why I’ve been slowly switching to Emacs for most of my work and a high-level overview of what customizations I am adding.

Why Emacs and Not Vim?

I don’t want to start a war on this topic. I don’t know both Emacs and Vim deeply enough to have a say on which one is better (if there is one that’s better than the other), but this Stack Overflow answer (along with other answers) pointed to me that Emacs is more customizable than Vim, which is, on the other hand, faster and easier to learn.

I was searching for an editor that I could (easily) turn into everything I wanted, and Emacs seemed to me like a better match.