Moving away from VScode

We had a good run, and I wasn’t like I dissatisfied with VScode but I was surrounded by a bunch of developers using VIM, and I was also getting a bit upset at how much of my RAM VScode was consuming.

I mean, realistically I wasn’t that bothered about the resource use, as it resulted in lightening fast text editing for a Electron app, but still, I had to come up with some excuses for my brain to justify the switch outside of VIM seems cool.

However, the anti-establishment brat in me recoiled at VIM and it’s dogmatic following. So I went on the hunt for a new editor and came across spacemacs. It had a VIM mode but also loads of cool build in features and lovely little code helpers.

After spending a few minutes going through vimtutor I felt ready enough to just start editing, and also felt like if spacemacs let me down anywhere I could move over to VIM with relatively little pain.

But after a week of trying to run spacemacs in iTerm I was getting very frustrated at the UI. I mean yes I’m using a terminal based text editor, so there is little to no UI, but I still wanted it to look cool and make me seem like a bad ass for using it.

Thats when I found http://emacsformacosx.com/ a dedicated emacs shell that I could run totally independently of iTerm. Yes! This was my saviour.

I’ve been running this setup for about 6 weeks now and I’m over the moon and completely converted. I keep hitting :w in slack to send messages and wish that all text editors had the NORMAL / VISUAL / INSERT mode distinction, it just makes so much more sense to me. When in NORMAL mode I have literally tens of keys available to perform specific tasks, whereas modern text editors need you to use various modifier keys to achieve the same thing.

And the best thing is, I also use VIM. I’m typing this in VIM right now for example; and that’s O.K. Horses for courses right, if all I want to do is make a quick change to a config file or sum’t similar. VIM’s my guy, but if I’m in project mode, then I’m all over spacemacs.

:wq