I find emacs to be very transparent compared to other editors. Also, it's exactly as complicated as I want/need it to be. I love the buffer abstraction, it fits very nicely with how I think in general. And I love that it generally "just works" with my pretty bare bones config.
I don't try to do everything inside emacs, probably to a fault. I don't even bother with, say, autocomplete, or on-the-fly syntax checking (I do use syntax highlighting!), I just run linters/formatters/unit tests externally regularly while working on code. I'm happy to defer terminal interaction to a real terminal emulator, although sometimes I use vterm from emacs. Oh, I will use magit though. Magit is awesome!
Don't get me wrong, I like VSCode in some ways, and I think it's a great tool. It's far more accessible in a lot of ways. But it's not really for me. I don't find it to be transparent. Things break often, probably because it's a less mature tool, but understanding why things break when they do tends to be frustrating and fraught by comparison. And it lacks anything remotely comparable to emacs buffers (at least last I checked: if you know of anything that does this in VSCode, I'd be happy to check it out!).
And to be clear, I know these arguments for emacs aren't super compelling. They're more expressions of taste and aesthetic preferences than anything else. Which is fine, we can all have different tastes and aesthetic preferences :)
I don't really understand how to use VSCode efficiently. IntelliJ IDEA has the best editor I've tried so far. I'm not suggesting it could be a replacement for Emacs, however.
I'm OK with giving up emacs for a powerful IDE in the right setting. I've used Visual Studio with ReSharper while editing C#, and that is a pretty phenomenal experience. But for whatever reason I don't feel like I need it when working on Python, bash, Golang, SQL, JS/TS, or any of the other languages I tend to work with
I don't try to do everything inside emacs, probably to a fault. I don't even bother with, say, autocomplete, or on-the-fly syntax checking (I do use syntax highlighting!), I just run linters/formatters/unit tests externally regularly while working on code. I'm happy to defer terminal interaction to a real terminal emulator, although sometimes I use vterm from emacs. Oh, I will use magit though. Magit is awesome!
Don't get me wrong, I like VSCode in some ways, and I think it's a great tool. It's far more accessible in a lot of ways. But it's not really for me. I don't find it to be transparent. Things break often, probably because it's a less mature tool, but understanding why things break when they do tends to be frustrating and fraught by comparison. And it lacks anything remotely comparable to emacs buffers (at least last I checked: if you know of anything that does this in VSCode, I'd be happy to check it out!).
And to be clear, I know these arguments for emacs aren't super compelling. They're more expressions of taste and aesthetic preferences than anything else. Which is fine, we can all have different tastes and aesthetic preferences :)