From Emacs to VSCode on OSX

Erwan Lemonnier
1 min readSep 19, 2022

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I have been using Emacs for over 20 years, but over the past years, it has become increasingly difficult to get my emacs environment properly working for Python. I felt jealous at all the auto-completion and built-in documentation features that students fresh out of uni got out of more modern editors. So I switched to Visual Studio Code.

Here are notes on how I set VSCode up to make me feel (almost) like on Emacs. Those notes apply to version 1.70.2 of VSCode, on OSX.

  1. Download VSCode
  2. Install the extension 'Awesome Emacs Keymaps' (code > preferences > extensions > search for 'awesome emacs' and click install)
  3. Choose a color theme: meta k meta t (for kolor theme?). I use 'light +'
  4. Turn on auto-trimming of whitespaces and newlines: code > preferences > settings > user > text editor > files, and check the 2 corresponding boxes
  5. Turn on native tabs: code > preferences > settings > user > window

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Erwan Lemonnier

CTO. Fullstack developer turned entrepreneur. Ex-employee of Spotify and Trustly. Author of the PyMacaron microservice framework.