Reusability is another factor for me. Often used solutions are converted to aliases, functions, shell scripts, etc.

I get all three of those w/ my VS Code setup...could you explain in more detail?

Your hands almost never have to leave the keyboard.

There is often not telemetry.

You can remotely connect from a different machine and you your development environment.

The cross-platform story is much better. For example, supporting BSDs.

It exposes you to a lot of details hidden or abstracted away by GUI applications.

Also, its a matter of preference.

I use VSCode daily. In my experience, 1) nearly every day VSCode wants me to update some extension, which I find annoying, 2) there is a teeny typing lag in VSCode when compared to my terminal. It is nothing you would typically notice and doesn't bother me, but typing in my terminal feels instantaneous, which makes it very pleasant.

VSCode isn’t much different from vim or emacs in terms of functionality: basic text editor that is configured for various tasks by plugins. Especially with the rise of LSP, the difference between VSCode and vim/emacs is basically preference.

> VSCode isn’t much different from vim or emacs in terms of functionality: basic text editor that is configured for various tasks by plugins.

Ease of extensibility is a big deal and vscode is much less easy to configure.

VSCode doesn't work uniformly throughout the application. In emacs, you'll quickly start to depend on all the places you can use M-r, M-n, and M-p to reverse search history for instance. This is one of many many examples where it's keyboard driven UX is superior.

Another big thing is that you can get help for every keybinding, click a link to it's function, and start modifying the implementation.

There was a recent podcast I can't recall that gave a good example of this... I'll look for it and post back if I find it.

I'm curious, how would you do what I describe here using isearch to query replace in vscode: https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/126w8xb/what_are_the...

My argument was the opposite, I use emacs for everything because its extensions are more composable and it’s a lot easier for me to write my own as I need them.

My point is just that the “why would anyone use a ‘text editor’ instead of an IDE” argument makes a little bit of sense when you’re comparing vim/emacs to IntelliJ, but VSCode is just as much a text editor out of the box as vim/emacs. And, despite being newer, it’s relatively uninspired compare to emacs.