Some months ago I decided to reorient my development career from the DevOps space to web development with JavaScript. I at first tried to apply my editor of choice (emacs)but was continually frustrated by the mediocre support for working with JavaScript, particularly compared to Python. After wasting at least a day trying to get my Emacs config to support basic completion and syntax checking in JavaScript I came across the blog post 10 Years of love for Emacs Undone by one week of VSCode. The title really struck me as I have spent exactly 10 years with Emacs myself. I decided to top swimming upstream and jump wholeheartedly into VS Code. It has been a mixed experience.

I was instantly struck how amazing VS Code's support is for the JavaScript language, libraries, and the web environment. Every tutorial on react, Vue.js, Electron, you name it, recommends using VS Code. My VS Code experience became even better when I learned to drop //@ts-check in every file. VS Code's language support is so awesome that I highly doubt any other editor will ever seriously compete with it in that regard. At the same time, I hit a pretty significant pain point instantly. I use emacs keybindings everywhere, in the shell, browser, you name it. On OS X, Karabiner mapped those bindings for me and now on linux laptop with GNOME it is a top-level feature. In VS Code I found that I was constantly closing the editor accidentally or deleting a text in a buffer with the most common commands that I use thousands of times a day. Here are just a few. I probably have >100 in muscle memory.

M-f forward word

M-b backward word

C-w cut text

M-w copy text

C-SPACE start a selection

C-a beginning line

C-e end of line

M-a back paragraph

M-e forward paragraph

C-s search forward

C-j Change buffer

and many more

I found an emacs plugin for VS Code but it only muddled the situation memory as it only supported some commands and then with annoying bugs that made the plugin more trouble than it was worth.

I dropped the emacs plugin and tried to do things the VS Code way. It only kind of worked for me but I soon encountered more hurdles. As a developer, there is a whole set of things we do that are project-related tasks such as:

Working with git

Renaming files, moving them around

Maintaining a personal TODO list and logging errors, troubleshooting information in a personal log

Executing shell commands

Writing documentation in markdown, ReST, asciidoc

While VS Code likely has some support for these, I found the VS Code plugins in these areas lacking when I tried them. For example, I found jumping between projects with Project Manager very poor in comparison to Emacs' incredible Projectile. It is important to note that the Project Manager addon may have improved significantly since I last used it a few months ago. The existing git addons also pale in comparison to Emacs' fantastic git interface. counsel-git-grep across a huge codebase truly is a superpower.

I am one of those crazy people that runs a terminal inside of emacs. I even have a keybinding (M-j) that I use to toggle between character and line mode in the terminal. VS Code's terminal is OK but nothing to write home about.

I use Emacs dired mode for manipulating files and directories. It works ridiculously well.

More than magit, projectile, dired, I missed emacs' ivy completion framework more than anything else. You really have to see it to believe it.

So while I could use VS Code for writing JavaScript, I still found myself spending 30-50% of my work time in Emacs. The mismatch between keybindings in VSCode and rest of my tools just kept tying my fingers in knots.

So far I have talked a whole lot about the Emacs features that I miss in VS Code. But surely, you ask, won't VS Code implement all of those features even better than Emacs given the VS Code teams extensive developer resources? Maybe, but I would be surprised if they did. I doubt the VS Code team intends to give it a kitchen sink of capabilities that we see in Emacs.

After one month, I decided to reinvestigate using Emacs for JavaScript. I came upon the awesome Tide-mode. It took me about a day but I got it working to my satisfaction. It does not hold a candle to VS Code but it provides me enough features to be productive in JavaScript.

Some of the features tide-mode provides:

auto-completion (via company-mode)

linting

syntax-checking (together w/ flycheck)

documentation at point

basic refactoring

Here is tide-mode in action

A few notes on using tide-mode:

You have to drop a jsconfig.json (for JavaScript) or tsconfig.json (for TypeScript) into your project in order to use it. You have to install typescript into your projects for it to work optimally. As it leverages the tsserver that ships with TypeScript. Note that it does not need to be a project dependency. You can install it thus with npm install typescript I am using Emacs 26. Not sure how well this works with Emacs 25 I haven't found a good way to fully support JSX in files with a regular .js extension. So far I have simply renamed any file containing JSX to .jsx in order to get web-mode + tide-mode to work properly.

I may be mistaken but I believe the tsserver that ships with TypeScript was developed by the same team that makes VS Code. It is not without irony that the Emacs mode I am using to replace of VS Code depends on software developed by the VS Code team.

VS Code is an excellent IDE and I would recommend any new software developer to use it. But with the excellent tide-mode, I no longer need to.

You can find my emacs configuration for JavaScript here.

P.S. I haven't figured out a great solutions for the following and would love to hear from you the readers.

Debugging - I still use VS Code but have looked into ndb. Don't know yet if it is a worthy replacement.

HTML element, css attribute completion - One of my favorite things about VS Code is that it supports completion and inline documentation for CSS and HTML, technologies that I know pathetically little about.

Browsing Mozilla, CSS documentation within Emacs - anyone have a good solution for this? iirc helm-dash has something useful here but I haven's seriously investigated it.

Auto-completion, linting for Flow - I don't use flow so I have been able to skip this so far but I very much would like to browse and contribute to the desktop application for Ledger and it uses Flow extensively.

P.P.S. Thanks so much to Anantha Kumaran for his work on tide-mode w/out which I would be stuck in VS Code.

Update: below is the magic incantation that I used in my web-mode configuration to get jsx syntax highlighting in regular .js files