Editor Philosophies: VS Code's Browser Core vs. Emacs's Internal Browser
Description
The meme uses the 'We are not the same' format, featuring Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring from Breaking Bad, looking stern and adjusting his tie. It contrasts two popular text editors by highlighting their underlying architecture. The top text, 'Your text editor runs inside a web browser,' is paired with the Visual Studio Code logo, referencing that VS Code is an Electron application built on the Chromium browser engine. The middle text, 'My web browser runs inside a text editor,' is accompanied by the Emacs logo, alluding to the fact that the highly extensible Emacs editor has its own built-in web browser (like `eww`). The punchline, 'We are not the same,' asserts a sense of superiority for the Emacs user. The joke delves into the 'editor wars,' making a nuanced point about software philosophy: comparing a modern, web-tech-based editor with a classic, monolithic, and endlessly customizable environment that some users treat as a complete operating system
Comments
12Comment deleted
VS Code is an editor that learned how to be a browser. Emacs is an operating system that condescends to edit text between browsing sessions and running a shell
VS Code ships a full Chromium so your editor can cosplay as a browser; Emacs just evals (eww "https://news.ycombinator.com") and renders the web in a buffer - because after 40 years of Lisp, context switching is the only thing we’ve garbage-collected
The real flex is when your junior asks why your IDE needs 2GB of RAM and you explain it's because someone decided JavaScript was a systems programming language, while the greybeard in the corner is reading email, browsing Reddit, and managing Kubernetes clusters... all from within their 1976 text editor
The real power move is running Emacs inside VS Code inside a browser inside a VM inside a container inside another VM, just to prove that abstraction layers are turtles all the way down - and your 64GB of RAM still isn't enough
VS Code: Chromium with syntax highlighting. Emacs: Lisp-powered universe with a browser side gig
VS Code is a browser pretending to be an editor; Emacs is an editor pretending to be an OS - only one lets you bind HTTP to C-x C-f and avoid paying the Electron RAM tax twice
Electron runs your editor in a browser; Emacs runs the browser as a buffer - same RAM tax, but only one lets me TRAMP into prod and Google the outage without alt‑tab
Guys, what it is? Comment deleted
Second it Comment deleted
Emacs 😉 Comment deleted
great OS & desktop environment, but it lacks decent editor ;) Comment deleted
Cap https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/visual-studio-code/microsoft-edge-devtools-extension Comment deleted