Emacs, Neovim, VS Code or Cursor: what editors programmers choose now
October 5, 2026 · 15 min read
Guido van Rossum compares Emacs, PyCharm and VS Code, ThePrimeagen champions Neovim, the Cursor founders rebuild the editor around AI and George Hotz gives his view of AI coding tools. Their choices show what programmers want from an editor as models start writing more of the code.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- No single winner: pick the editor that removes your own bottleneck.
- Van Rossum moved from Emacs to VS Code for its small core and extensible packages.
- He used PyCharm to navigate a five-million-line codebase.
- Van Rossum: Copilot is usually slightly wrong but saves typing on boring code.
- ThePrimeagen: Neovim, keyboard only; know your editor deeply, whichever it is.
- ThePrimeagen: limit editor tinkering to about once a year.
- ThePrimeagen: Copilot raised his bug rate; reading code is not writing code.
- ThePrimeagen: juniors who offload everything stay juniors.
- Cursor founders forked VS Code to rebuild the editor around the model.
- Cursor founders admit agents and AI bug finding are not there for most tasks.
- Hotz: five percent typing, 95 percent debugging, by his own estimate.
- Hotz: he wants AI that finds bugs, like a type checker, not near-correct code.
- Hotz: if Copilot saves lots of boilerplate, the framework may be the problem.
- All agree AI is weak at hard debugging and will not replace programmers soon.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.