Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[ndame]

> There are certainly some things Emacs still does better with respect to editing, like editing of binary data or even ascii art etc.

Don't forget that vscode has tons of extensions, people jumped at the opportunity to extend the editor with an easy to use and familiar scripting language (js).

So they can edit hex: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stef-levesque/vscode-hexdump/master/images/hover-dataview.png

And ascii art: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Canna71/vscode-figlet/master/figlet.gif

Vscode has a powerful display engine and a widely used scripting language which is a winning combination. Emacs could close the gap somewhat if it used some existing graphics display engine, instead of reimplementing everything, because Vscode and other tools which use common graphics toolkits get every development for free and can concentrate on developing the editor instead.

> VS Code is probably a good example. While I still prefer Emacs, if I'm really honest, from a purely editing perspective, VS Code is as good and feature rich. Where it fails is in the ease of extensibility and ability to customize to fit how I like to work - with VS Code, I need to adjust more to how VS Code wants to work, but when it comes to just writing source code, they are both pretty equivalent.

Yes, the only thing vscode doesn't have is rapid prototyping, extending the environment quickly. Writing an extension for it is much more cumbersome (no built-in docs for the api either, you have to browse the web for that), but most users don't write extensions anyway, they just want to use existing ones, so this doesn't concern them.