Despite the joy it brings me I’ve always balked at recommending Spacemacs + ESS as a dev environment for #rstats due to the brutal learning curve. However yesterday, thanks to Jack of Some’s Youtube channel, I discovered there is a reasonably faithful port of Spacemacs to VSCode. It’s called VSpaceCode and it’s completely compatible with the R extension!

I gave it a blast today and work and it screams on Windows compared to the Emacs version. The responsiveness just can’t be un-felt, and will definitely be addictive. There’s even a built in port of magit that was again super slick compared to the slowness of the Emacs native version.

Interestingly, I have noticed the situation is reversed on my personal laptop running linux, where there seem to be a few performance glitches in VSCode. There’s still no one editor to rule them all it seems - But it feels like a similar enough experience that I could be productive using the faster one on each platform. We’ll see as I rack up more time with VSpaceCode.