Toward a "modern" Emacs [LWN.net]

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 11:55 UTC (Sun) by cmonsanto (subscriber, #96651)
In reply to: Toward a "modern" Emacs by dottedmag
Parent article: Toward a "modern" Emacs

> I don't understand

There's nothing to understand, it's a technically inferior solution. It was a hassle decades ago, and unacceptable in the age of LSP.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 14:27 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

It's a "technically inferior" solution whose inferiority matters roughly 0.00% of the time, to the nearest hundredth of a percent. This is really nitpicking.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 27, 2020 15:49 UTC (Sun) by cmonsanto (subscriber, #96651) [Link] (4 responses)

It's not nitpicking. The tags solution requires more work to setup and you get less from it. If it works for you then great, but why would a new user want to learn this arcane workflow when LSP Just Works(tm) in VSCode, the editor everyone else in their office uses? This is what I'm getting at when I say tags are "unacceptable" in this day in age.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 0:32 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

Never having used VSCode before, I gave it a whirl. Fired it up on a directory containing some C sources, installed the C/C++ addon, and...

The cross-referencing didn't work. Every time I tried to jump to the definition of a function, it took me to the declaration instead. So much for "Just Works (tm)".

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 5:14 UTC (Mon) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

The C/C++/C# extensions for VSCode come from Microsoft. Call me paranoid, but I suspect Microsoft does not really want VSCode to be easy to use on projects using those languages. This because they don't want it to compete with their commercial offering, the original Visual Studio.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 5:24 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

The original MSVS is 0xDEAD. It's stuck on 32 bits and apparently moving it to 64 bits would be tantamount to rewriting it fully. It's still being developed with incremental features because VSCode is not yet up to feature parity, but that's just a matter of time.

There's no incentive for MS to sabotage VSCode, they want to make sure developers are using Microsoft's tools that conveniently have all these nice out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft services.

I have no idea what went wrong for you, but my VSCode works just fine with navigation and refactoring support.

Toward a "modern" Emacs

Posted Sep 28, 2020 12:04 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I also investigated using VSCode for Perl development. The Perl extension I found asks you to install (surprise) ctags. So again, meh.