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It's an apples to oranges comparison because Visual Studio is an IDE built for programming for Windows while Emacs is a text editor that can edit C++, Python, function as a Lisp IDE, edit org charts, browse the web, play music, read e-mail and typeset papers, among other things. It's, actually, a small OS built to emulate the OS Lisp machines ran.

Emacs can be used as an IDE. I use it every day that way. I can use it like that because it's completely programmable. When I needed a Pyccuracy-specific editor, it took me an afternoon to write one (not from scratch) in Emacs-Lisp. I could probably have a spreadsheet inside it, if I really wanted.

Try to build a Lisp IDE inside Excel... ;-)

About the "go to definition" thing, it depends on what major/minor mode you are using. There is probably something like that for C-ish development. I just never used it.

And for finding all files in a project, there must be something that parses makefiles and rounds up source files. Emacs is older than many of us and someone must have already solved this specific problem in the past 40 years.

I am playing with "nav" in order to build special-purpose browsers. I would love to have a YQL-mode, but I feel I should replicate the multi-pane tool Yahoo makes availabe.




Calling emacs a text editor is a bit disingenuous isn't it?


I also said "It's, actually, a small OS built to emulate the OS Lisp machines ran"

The way you interact with Emacs is through a text editor.




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