Thanks, but no thanks.

I don't like vscode extensions advertising to me every 5 seconds, auto-downgrading the free versions of extensions, auto-installing aux tools every 5 seconds, having a 400 MB RSS chromium runtime (remember Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping? VS code is much worse; and it's also just a plain text editor); nerfing the .net debugger and breaking hot reload on purpose in VSCodium; telemetry, .... it's so noisy all the time. You are using this? On purpose?!

VS code is basically the same idea as emacs, just the MVP variant and with a lot of questionable technology choices (Javascript? Electron? Then emulate terminal cells anyway and manually copy cell contents? uhhh. What is this? Retrofuturism?) and done with the usual Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish tactics (nerfing pylance, funny license terms on some extensions that the extensions are only allowed to be used in their vscode etc).

So if you didn't like emacs you probably wouldn't like vscode either.

Also, if you use anything BUT emacs for Lisp development, what do you use that doesn't have a jarring break between the Lisp image and you? vim seems weird for that use case :)

emacs is very very good for Lisp development.

On the other hand, VSCode for Lisp is very flaky and VSCode regularily breaks your Lisp projects. Did you try it?

Because of your comment I tried VSCode again and now about 20 extensions (one of them "Alive", a Lisp extension for vscode) complain about now missing

"Dev container: Docker from Docker Compose"

(keep in mind they worked before and I didn't change anything in vscode--I hadn't even run VSCode for 8 months or so) and when I try to fix that by clicking on the message in the extension manager the message immediately disappears from all 20 extensions in the manager (WTF?) and I get:

>>./logs/20250112T181356/window1/exthost/ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers/remoteContainers-2025-01-12T17-13-58.234Z.log:
>>>> Executing external compose provider "/home/dannym/.guix-home/profile/bin/podman-compose". Please see podman-compose(1) for how to disable this message. <<<<
>a239310d8b933dc85cc7671d2c90a75580fc57a309905298170eac4e7618d0c1
>Error: statfs /var/run/docker.sock: no such file or directory
>Error: no container with name or ID "serverdevcontainer_app_1" found: no such container

... because it's using podman (I didn't configure that--vscode did that on its own, incompletely. Also, it thinks that means having a docker/podman service running as root has to be a thing then (instead of rootless podman). Funny thing is I use podman extensively. I don't wanna know how bad it would be if I HADN'T set podman up already).

So it didn't actually fix anything, but it removed the error message. I see.
And there's no REPL for the editor--so I can't actually find out details, let alone fix anything.

I had thought emacs DX was bad--but I've revised my opinion now: compared to vscode DX, emacs DX is great. You live with VSCode if you want to.

And note, vscode was made after emacs was made. There's no excuse for this.

I think this now was about all the time that I want to waste on this thing, again.

How is this a problem in 2025? shakes head

>VS Code managed to by-pass the qualitiy and amount of extensions/plugins in a fraction of time Emacs took decades.

Yeah? Seems to me these vscode extensions are written in crayon. Bad quality like that would never make it into emacs mainline. And it's not even strictly about that! I wonder who would write a developer tool that the developer can't easily debug its own extensions in (yes, I know about Ctrl-Shift-P). That flies about as well as a lead balloon.

For comparison, there's emacs bufferenv that does dev containerization like this and it works just fine. Configuration: 1 line--the names of the containerfiles one wants it to pick up. Also, if I wanted to debug what it did (which is rare) I could just evaluate any expression whatsoever in emacs. ("Alt-ESC : «expression»" anywhere)

PS. manually running "podman-compose up" in an example project as a regular user works just fine--starts up the project and everything needed. So what are they overcomplicating here? Pipes too hard?

PPS. I've read some blog article to make socket activation work for rootless podman[1] but it's not really talking about vscode. Instead, it talks how one would set up "linger" so that the container stays there when I'm logged out. So that's not for dev containers (why would I possibly want that there? I'm not ensuring Heisenbugs myself :P).

[1] https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...