916 Days of Emacs

https://sqrtminusone.xyz/posts/2023-04-13-emacs/

by d-s • 3 years ago

283 293 3 years ago

pyrophane• 3 years ago

Poof I made my free-time disappear

- Ellis Kenyő, on being called an "elisp mage"

Haha, this is exactly what I fear if I tried to switch from Neovim to Emacs. I have a pretty bare-bones Emacs config that I started a while back, but haven't spent the time to really get it going.

goldfeld2• 3 years ago

Maybe Doom Emacs can win me back, I ended up preferring the vim emulation mode in Emacs, evil, over nvim but my dotfiles bitrotted over the long years

ddavis2• 3 years ago

Cool post! I really don't want to know how much time I've spent configuring Emacs over the last 12 years :P The explosion of great Emacs Lisp packages over the last few years has absolutely made it difficult to avoid forever playing around with Emacs.

TheCondor• 3 years ago

Have you tried any of the distributions? I have had sort of a semi-annual ritual of re-evaluating my emacs configuration. This last December I've tried Centaur out and while it's not perfect, it's not too bad. Definitely an interesting place to start from.

ddavis2• 3 years ago

I’ve never used one. I’ve declared init.el bankruptcy a few times in those 12 years but I always build from vanilla Emacs- lots of use-package use though.

hammyhavoc2• 3 years ago

I'd love to give it another try, but not convinced it's a good fit for me. Love it conceptually though.

The stumbling block I usually come to is wondering how to utilize these data sets on my smartphone in an efficient and effective manner.

ryukafalz• 3 years ago

It does only work for a subset of org-mode functionality, but for TODOs and similar I find Orgzly on Android works great. I sync between my laptop and phone via Syncthing.

hammyhavoc2• 3 years ago

Wow! That's exactly what I hoped for. That's lovely looking.

ctur• 3 years ago

I find the iOS app BeOrg great for mobile access to my org mode inbox. It works well as not only a place to write quick notes but also to, say, "share to" links from Safari and other apps to create inbox entries as well to quickly capture URLs to view later.

arminiusreturns• 3 years ago

I use emacs from termux frequently, even better if I use my bluetooth keyboard and hdmi out to a tv, but even though the text is small in normal mode I still prefer it to any of the fdroid emacs or org mode packages.

For those who worry about runaway configs, I highly suggest starting with sanemacs for a good minimal configuration you can start with and build from a good foundation on.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

As I said, I started from the point of zero experience with Lisp. I had a degree in software engineering, but I don’t feel like it has helped me in any direct sense. At most, it exposed me to different kinds and concepts of programming, but I am confident that it’s anything but a prerequisite, as also shown by the story of Protesilaos.

A reminder that back in the late 1970s, secretaries at MIT who knew nothing about programming were using Lisp to customize Multics Emacs to their liking and workflow -- and Emacs was far less convenient then than it is now!

The weird trick they used was, telling the secretaries they were just customizing their editor, not programming it!

camgunz• 3 years ago

This website is a treasure trove of emacs config goodness. Bookmarked to come back to to explore switching from vim once again.

Pr0ject2172• 3 years ago

I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs a couple of months ago.

I've been using ChatGPT (GPT-4) to help me write config (~1,000 lines of elisp code so far) and it's been very interesting/fun. I'm not going back.

bachback• 3 years ago

very cool can you share more?

Pr0ject2172• 3 years ago

My process is kind of organic.

I'll start working on a project, and if I run into something that feels wrong about the Doom Emacs default config/keybindings, I'll just open up a conversation with ChatGPT (the GPT-4 model, it's much better than 3.5).

I'll tell it that I'm using Doom Emacs, and then explain what I want, or what problem I'm having, and it will output code that I can try. It's not always correct on the first try, and sometimes I have to have a dialogue with it for a little while before it gets it right. Sometimes it struggles and begins to guess - and for those cases, I'll fall back to doing manual searches in Google, and if that fails, give up entirely and just write myself a TODO comment and keep marching forward.

It's help me set up config quickly that would've taken me a very long time to figure out.

BeetleB7• 3 years ago

That's interesting. I've asked Bing Chat and ChatGPT several times to write me elisp code, and not once did it work well. It often invents APIs.

newtwilly• 3 years ago

I recently had GPT 3.5 write me a function for translating the number under point to an ISO timestamp. It handled whether the epoch number was milliseconds or seconds since epoch. I kinda had to iterate on it and ask it to do some things different, but it never wrote invalid code.

ParetoOptimal8• 3 years ago

Hm, I've had luck with openai gpt4. I've had it make fake APIs before, but usually when I say "fooFakeApi doesn't exist" it corrects itself.

commandlinefan6• 3 years ago

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which are (for some reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

celeritascelery• 3 years ago

I am surprised you didn’t use evil-mode to emulate the vim keybindings. Or was this a an attempt to use “pure” Emacs without packages and customization?

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option.

Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.

mtnygard• 3 years ago

They're the default keys because a lot of programs use the GNU readline package for line editing.

tomjakubowski• 3 years ago

It's also possible to configure GNU readline on your system to use vi keys. See https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Use_vi_shortcuts_in_terminal

Put this in ~/.inputrc

  set editing-mode vi
  set keymap vi-command

softirq5• 3 years ago

I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable.

Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git etc. Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they’re all usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc. If you’re not editing and need email, mutt is a great email client. Irssi is a great chat client. Emacs is very much an all or nothing computing environment.

I am glad I tried Emacs though, because I did love which-key and ended up adding it to my Vim config. And Emacs is slightly easier to quit?

ADVICE: Try both Emacs and Vim vanilla before you do anything else. Downloading a "distro" is really doing yourself a disservice by not showing you just how much either can do without the chrome. And for the love of RMS DON'T USE VSCODE.

kqr2• 3 years ago

Huh, my experience is the other way around. The "killer" of vim is the control scheme, and evil mode ports that over very faithfully to emacs. Then you get the best of both worlds. Why would you use vim other than in very barebones environments where you cannot access your own config?

(I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

mr337• 3 years ago

I am in the same boat. Been working a lot with C++ recently and could not get debugging working. Threw in the towel and loaded vscode in about 2 hours had everything humming along and being productive.

I'm pretty sure I did the wrong thing and started with a setup like Spacemacs where random stuff would break and wouldn't even know where to look. Thought I can't seem to loose the muscle memory of vim bindings so evil is a must. On my next round will try dooms or centaur so I learn more under the hood. I do miss magit and helm.

EnigmaCurry2• 3 years ago

some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable.

Over SSH? Did you turn on ssh connection sharing in ssh config?

ControlMaster auto
ControlPersist yes
ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%u-%r@%h:%p

massive speedup when you do this, otherwise it starts a new connection for every operation.

erksa2• 3 years ago

Use both heavily. Vim is fantastic for editing one off files.

Emacs on the other hand is fantastic to work on a computer for a long period of time. I do use evil mode, as I do think it's a much better way to work in a file. Project management, magit, org-mode, being able to edit functionality of the editor within couple of mins to adjust for an temporary change/or indefinitely is what keeps me coming back to emacs.

I've tried vim variations that build in project management and all I'm missing from emacs, but left it at some own written telescope functions to cover base needs.

Love for both, but to me they are not comparable.

(Maybe because I picked up emacs at the same time a good friend picked up vim, and it's been a parallel editor journey for 6+ years)

mbork_pl2• 3 years ago

There’s really nothing killer in Emacs

1. Org mode 2. Magit 3. Wdired 4. Synergy between various components (shameless plug: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_benefits_of_everything_being...)

BeetleB7• 3 years ago

The tell in your message (and those in general from vim users), is insisting on treating Emacs as an editor, and comparing it primarily on that benchmark.

There are no shortage of Emacs lovers and users who will accept that vim is a better editor. You didn't need to try Emacs to gain that appreciation.

The other tell (common on HN, which has a clear selection bias), is comparing Emacs to an IDE like VS Code. Many, if not the majority, of Emacs users are not primarily using Emacs for coding.

Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy.

Neither follows the Unix philosophy well. And as many people have pointed out, most of the Unix utilities are poor at following it well.[1] The amusing thing about the Unix philosophy is that when you stay within Emacs, the Emacs environment is a much better exemplar of the Unix philosophy than Unix and its tools are. It is a lot easier to compose functionalities in different Emacs packages than it is in UNIX.

I was using a Mastodon client for Emacs and wanted to render LaTeX formulae into rendered equations. I'm an average elisp coder and I got this working in under an hour by composing different Emacs packages.

There are various ChatGPT clients out there. I wanted to integrate it with my Emacs email client (notmuch). It's not a lot of work. I doubt one could integrate things into mutt as quickly/easily.

When reading an email in Mutt, how easy is it to quickly do a Web/network query on a selected text, perform analysis on the result, and display the outcome within Mutt? The analogue is fairly easy in Emacs, despite the mail tool(s) there not having any functionality to do this.

As for Mutt in general: I used it for about a decade. While it has a soft spot in my heart, there is a reason I switched to an Emacs client - before I knew anything about customizing Emacs with elisp. There were lots of gaps in Mutt that other clients out there filled. I miss nothing from Mutt, other than the color scheme.

In many of these cases, there are simply no quick, viable solutions outside of Emacs. People spend a lot of time doing these things in Emacs because it enables them to do more than they could otherwise. Imagine someone who doesn't know any programming complaining about someone else who does. To them they just see a person "wasting" all their time on another "tool".

[1] An example: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/25/unix-doesnt-follow...

I've had the same visceral reaction when dealing with grep and find. Overly complex and bloated (albeit extremely useful).

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

"Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they’re all usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc"

This is a bold claim. Not that fzf isn't good, but I'd like to hear about some specific ways in which fzf is better.

vvillena2• 3 years ago

The strength of Emacs lies in customizing it to the user's needs. A clean installation of Emacs is not representative of what Emacs can be, but the various modern configuration frameworks such as Spacemacs and Doom Emacs offer a window into their creators' visions of what Emacs can be. And from there, it's easy to slowly transform their vision into your own.

These frameworks offer good defaults that lean towards having lots of features packed in, but it's easy to take away everything you don't want. Both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs can be stripped to almost nothing, leaving you with just a standard for organizing your custom configuration.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

Vim is pretty much the best of both worlds: the ease of use of vi combined with the small footprint of Emacs!

alyandon• 3 years ago

I had a very similar experience and at the end of the day I switched back to vi(m) (and specialized IDEs) mostly because I didn't have the time to constantly evolve my emacs environment to solve the tasks at hand efficiently. I can see the appeal of emacs though if you really have the time and energy to deep dive and make it your own environment.

To this day, I still swap ctrl/capslock - that is so useful that it should just be a standard.

taeric4• 3 years ago

The default cursor movement commands probably predate emacs. Such that you are used to readline defaults. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083753 is the first post I'm finding on that.

That said, I'm curious what the weight of emacs was on you? If it was that you were wanting to be in the other editor, than it makes sense that you should stay in the other editor. But this is no different than a lot of things. Is why some folks don't like changing the vehicle type that they use daily. Very little rational argument one way or the other. Such that, yes, you should use what makes you happy. Not only does it make you happy, but you are probably more effective because of that.

commandlinefan6• 3 years ago

what the weight of emacs was on you

What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just using an IDE.

But that's just me.

vmladenov• 3 years ago

Emacs predates readline by 13 years

circuit2• 3 years ago

I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands.

to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.

Most of vim is written in C with some interfaces exposed for scripting. Emacs is mostly written in elisp with some C code where necessary. The latter lends itself better to 'hackability' imo

For my own machines, I build emacs and import my saved init.el

On other machines, there is usually a standard vi/vim install that I can use if I am ssh'd in somewhere where I don't have my personalized copy of emacs. If I remember, I'll try to put these five lines[1] in the .vimrc for some saner defaults

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25410390

outworlder2• 3 years ago

Why don't you SSH _from_ Emacs?

If you are editing a remote file there's usually no need to SSH and then invoke an editor.

https://willschenk.com/howto/2020/tramp_tricks/

NERD_ALERT• 3 years ago

Vimscript is a pain but these days you can use Neovim which supports Lua as a replacement. I’d recommend checking out what Neovim has to offer. ThePrimeagen has a great video on setting up Neovim as an IDE from scratch.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w7i4amO_zaE

lenkite• 3 years ago

Neovim supports Lua and Fennel (a Lisp atop Lua) https://fennel-lang.org/ https://github.com/Olical/aniseed

juped• 3 years ago

Emacs is an operating system, not an editor; I'm really not sure why Stallman constantly promoted the "emacs vs. vi" meme.

You might as well try to switch from Notepad to Linux. It's just a type error, and you'll have a bad time.

commandlinefan6• 3 years ago

Emacs is an operating system

Reminds me of an old joke: "Emacs would be a great OS, if only it came with a decent text editor..."

0zemp1c3• 3 years ago

Emacs is an operating system, not an editor

what does it take for this tired and false meme to die?

eequah9L• 3 years ago

Not an operating system, more like a desktop environment.

co_dh• 3 years ago

A single threaded OS. I remember that sometimes I launched a slow process in emacs, and then can do nothing but wait.

pxc• 3 years ago

the emacs cursor movement commands, which are (for some reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

I think this is because they're used in GNU readline. They're also defaults in all the macOS GUIs, though, so maybe not.

commandlinefan6• 3 years ago

GNU readline

Interesting... I always assumed that emacs was around for a while before anybody generalized a "readline" library, but I guess it makes sense that readline would have come first.

jb1991• 3 years ago

the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

and also macOS!

LastNevadan• 3 years ago

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials.

I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi.

After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judgement as an undergraduate was often incorrect. (I had also deemed Voltaire, Spanish, sociology, microeconomics and many other things as "stupid", and came to understand as an adult that they weren't.) So, I decided to give emacs another chance.

My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost always on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit.

I noticed that lots of skilled and professional engineers never learned to touch type. That discovery itself was odd to me: why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly. But they do. And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist.

shagie• 3 years ago

My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit.

I had been playing rogue and nethack for a bit when I started programming. The keys hjkl for doing movement was a natural transition to a vt-100 terminal for writing code in vi.

I had also been coding in LPMuds for a bit and the ed command set was firmly engrained in my mind. With vi being both "move using rogue keys" and "do the fancy stuff with the ed commands" there wasn't even a second thought spent on considering emacs.

smokel• 3 years ago

Many people who use Emacs a lot make CapsLock an additional Ctrl. Using your left-hand little finger makes it trivial to use C-p, C-n, C-f, C-b as cursor keys.

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

"My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit."

In emacs you can type exactly the same as in vi/vim if you use something like evil, doom, or spacemacs.

archarios• 3 years ago

Unless you use a keyboard like a Dactyl Manuform that provides your thumbs with better access to such modifier keys https://github.com/abstracthat/dactyl-manuform

BeetleB7• 3 years ago

why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly.

I have not found typing speed to correlate well with productivity. I spend quite a lot of time thinking while coding.

tmtvl2• 3 years ago

That's weird, I'm a Dvorak touch typist and I find the Alt keys to be much easier to reach than Escape. To reach Escape I basically have to leave the home row, while to reach one of the Alts I simply have to bend my ring finger.

tric• 3 years ago

Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist.

hmm.... I wonder if this is the reason Mac OS uses the option key for things like 'kill word' (ctrl+backspace on other OSes or ctrl+w in vi). I have a hard time typing quickly using option/command instead of ctrl.

I also prefer vi-like keybindings.

peterashford3• 3 years ago

I simply rebound the keys.

keybored• 3 years ago

In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi.

That’s what we do when we’re younger. Judge things on the wrong basis. Or come up with weird theories on how people who prefer different things do so because they’re deficient in some way—

Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist.

wait what…

And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist.

You see that the there are Alt and Control keys on both sides of the (American[1]) keyboard. Right? Touch typing is no harder with Control and Alt than it is with Shift.

And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist.

One Year of Experience Ten Times Over: The Comment.

[1] The keyboard (ish) that these silly programs were kind of made for. The “European” keyboard has AltGr on the right side.

Blackthorn4• 3 years ago

I noticed that lots of skilled and professional engineers never learned to touch type. That discovery itself was odd to me: why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly. But they do.

This is a false dilemma. Plenty of us type quickly without hunting and pecking, or looking at the keyboard, without home-row touch typing. This comment was typed as such.

There isn't anything "proper" about home row style touch typing, it is merely one of multiple ways to type fast.

craigching• 3 years ago

I’m a touch typist and don’t find that argument valid either for vi or emacs. And I’ve used emacs for over 30 years now and still do use vi occasionally on production servers where I’m not going to load my full emacs config just for sys admin work.

avindroth2• 3 years ago

After years of vim, I started using emacs with an ergonomic keyboard on my tower. Then I tried emacs with my mbp, and it was so much worse (ergonomically) than vim. I think emacs without ergonomic keyboard is just really painful.

jimbokun3• 3 years ago

Not saying your choice is wrong for you, but I always map caps lock to control and that makes Emacs far more ergonomic.

tcmart142• 3 years ago

Just a comment on the last point and purely opinion. Touch typing is fast and worth it if your typing like a word document. I've tried to get into touch typing, and it can be worth it, but for everyday programming, it doesn't really help me type faster. I type a few lines, stop and think about the code I've written. Programming also makes you hit a series of weird symbols most people don't. Think turbofish operator. The, probably, milliseconds touch typing saves me between writing a few lines to then contemplate just isn't a big enough speed benefit.

With that being said, I consider how I type a combination. I sort of touch type, but Im not completely glued to it. I don't worry if my hands cross as times. However, at the end of the day, if people enjoy touch typing and feel it helps them, they should! No one should swear it off just because I don't feel its that much of a performance boast for me personally.

medo-bear• 3 years ago

in the same way vi users swap escape with capslock, some emacs users swap left alt with capslock

green7ea• 3 years ago

That's an interesting guess but I wouldn't necessarily agree.

I've been a touch typist as long as I can remember and have been an avid emacs user for the last 15 years. I used vim for about 2 years before switching. I do have my caps lock bound to CTRL and have ALT+(jkl;) as movement keys in emacs so that might be a sign that there is some truth to what you say.

I would guess the reason that I used vim instead of emacs at the start was the learning curve - I simply couldn't bother to learn all the emacs combinations and program in elisp whereas in vim, I could be somewhat productive without much to learn.

Once I learned emacs, it was hard to go back to anything else but I still use vim on other machines when emacs isn't available.

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

What all the hype is about depends on how you use emacs, what you add to it and how you configure it.

I used vi and vim for 25 years before switching to emacs, and I spent a ton of time making it very vim like.

Now my emacs can do way more than vim ever did. Things like:

- browse the web through emacs - read my email through emacs - use org-mode to take notes in outline format, with hyperlinks, tables, executable source blocks, etc - use magit, which is a great interface to git

All of these things and more are tightly integrated, so moving text/data between them and editing that data is seamless.

It's all programmed and configured in elisp, and is part of a gigantic elisp ecosystem. Though I much prefer Scheme to elisp, I like elisp far more than vimscript, python, lua, or pretty much any other non-lisp language.

Emacs has some shortcomings (like handling long lines and large files, and certain types of regex handling that vim can do better), and while I do occasionally still fire up vim, I've felt no yearning to go back to it permanently.

For me emacs does everything vim did and far, far more.

w0m• 3 years ago

magit and org-mode are the two items that made me try emacs a few times now. Never been able to make it stick though.

_a_a_a_3• 3 years ago

and certain types of regex handling that vim can do better

Hi, emacs user here, can you elaborate please.

lanstin5• 3 years ago

What browser do you use? I used to use w3 but it is unsatisfactory now.

ragnese3• 3 years ago

to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.

As an Emacs user[1], I agree. The flexibility is really cool, and there are a handful of Emacs applications (notice I didn't call them "packages") that are "killer apps", like Magit, Org-Mode, Calc, etc.

But, even though I do use and like Emacs, I can't honestly recommend it to anyone and I wouldn't even consider it to be a very good programming environment unless you're specifically working in a Lisp/Scheme (where it's awesome).

These days, I mostly use Emacs for programming in Rust and for using Magit as a git porcelain even when not using Emacs for the actual code editing.

Here are the things that suck[2] about Emacs (mostly from the point of view of a programming text editor):

* The UI is slow. Don't tell me that it's "only" when we have long lines, or too much syntax highlighting or whatever. Sure, if I turn off all of the useful programming features, the UI updates fast enough for me to not notice any latency, but any time I open a file that uses a LSP server or equivalent (not just Rust- I've done Clojure, JavaScript, PHP, and C++ in Emacs), the latency for even just moving the cursor around is noticeable and it's distracting.

* Tramp sucks. I don't understand how everyone says that Tramp is awesome and magical. Every single time I've tried to use it to do anything, it's been a bad experience. It's been a few years since I've even tried it, but I remember having to wrestle with ssh-agent authentication, some packages not playing nicely with it (besides the "obvious" ones like LSP-mode), and the whole application hanging if the Tramp session hung for some reason.

* It's actually really HARD to customize properly. The experts say that Emacs is "self-documenting" and "introspectable", but many times, I'll try to customize some behavior or a keymap or something, and I'll read the documentation for a variable or function and it'll say something like "takes a plist of FOO definitions,"--well, what the heck does a "FOO" definition look like? What are the keys for the plist? What are acceptable values for those keys? It's very common to just have to dig through the actual elisp code to find out. Then, you'll find out that your customization doesn't even work correctly because some other mode or function stomps on your code, or gets initialized in a different logic path that isn't affected by your change. Since every feature and every package is different, you have little chance of just figuring out a few conventions or any standard structure for packages.

* Handling buffers is tedious. Sometimes buffers appear and take over the whole frame, sometimes they split the frame and steal focus, and sometimes they split the frame and don't steal focus. And it's very ad-hoc and tedious to try to separate out "background, system buffers" from "my actual work buffers". There are tons of Emacs packages that attempt to make it easier to manage buffers, switch between them more easily, group them in lists, etc.

Like I said, I like Emacs. But, I also run Linux on my personal machines and run a de-Googled AOSP ROM on my rooted Android phone. UX, polish, and convenience are obviously not a high priority for me.

[1]: I've used Emacs to varying degrees and with varying levels of dedication and hardcore-ness since 2008-ish. At a few points, I would've said that I was pretty competent/proficient in Elisp, and have authored some fairly elaborate functions to help me with common tasks within Emacs. I even use to try to do a version of "literate programming" with org-mode and org-mode babel blocks in place of something like Jupyter notebooks for Python.

[2]: Yes, this is a very negative comment, but I tend to complain loudest about the things that I love and care about. I don't complain or criticize things that I don't like or don't want to use.

BeetleB7• 3 years ago

Handling buffers is tedious.

I feel the pain. I often daydream about spending time customizing it to my needs, and add that to the other 576 ways I want to customize it and don't have time.

And then I sigh and remind myself "At least it's better than tabs!" before I return to my tasks at hand.

ithrow• 3 years ago

I have love/hate relationship with Emacs too, but for the stuff I do in Emacs I hate other software more. So Emacs it is.

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

I love emacs, but agree with many of your criticisms.

Emacs can be slow. I don't use LSP, so can't comment on that, but it's definitely slow on long lines with syntax highlighting.

I don't use TRAMP for exactly one of the reasons you mentioned: it can hang Emacs. I want to avoid that at all costs, because I pretty much live in Emacs.

Emacs' default handling of windows (in emacs terminology it's "windows", not "buffers" that you're talking about) is painful, but you can improve that through various packages, like popper[1]

Depending on what problems you run in to and your skill level, it could be tricky to debug elisp programs. However, compare that to when you run in to some bug in VSCode... how are you going to debug that? You'll probably have to submit a bug report and wait for the developers to get to it (if they ever do)... how is that better than emacs?

Also, remember that you don't have to go it alone in troubleshooting the issues you run in to with emacs. There's a whole community ready and willing to help.

Despite the downsides of emacs, I still use and love it. Every editor has downsides, and emacs is no exception. Its positives far, far outweigh the negatives for me. There's just so much more that it can do than other editors, and it's far more customizable. I very much doubt I'll ever seriously consider switching to another.

[1] https://github.com/karthink/popper

cassepipe• 3 years ago

I am personnally fan of command line vi modes. readline has one (bash, gdb, and others), zsh and fish have (a better) one too. I have remapped Caps Lock to Esc and it's never been easier to just go up and down the history with j an k and to make quick edits.

papaver2• 3 years ago

would definitely agree. i find tmux + vim does almost everything i need. granted i don't try to script anything myself. generally there are command line tools or vim plugins that do most i want. adding to much gravy to vim also just slows vim down which can be incredibly frustrating when one is used to typing very fast.

i would say just a couple of years of vim isn't enough to really become one with the software. think it took me around 5 years to really understand why vim is amazing. took me at least one year just to get the hang of it properly and be highly productive. i can't even type in a normal editor anymore as my brain is wired to vim commands. and i still to this day learn new commands which make my life easier.

that being said i totally understand why people love emacs. but i get a decent amount of the window management stuff just using the tmux.

and vi is installed almost everywhere as an editor which makes editing in 90% of environments a breeze. even when in windows gvim does pretty good.

avgcorrection3• 3 years ago

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about.

This is like saying that you have been a mountain biker all your life, but then decided to play the trumpet for one year. Nonsensical conjunction.

jvanderbot• 3 years ago

Nonsense. Emacs and vi have similar use cases, right? And similar inputs (keyboard) and similar environments, for similar users.

They might be a difference of degree along a few axes, but they aren't a difference of kind like trumpets and mountain bikes are.

smabie• 3 years ago

As someone who used Emacs 10yrs before ditching it.. I just really don't think it's very good at doing much.

I mean sure it can sorta half ass a lot of different things but besides org-mode and magit, it's a pretty mediocre and clunky piece of software (clunky, incredibly slow, ugly, etc)

weaksauce• 3 years ago

why didn't you just use evil mode? vim is great and so is emacs and with evil mode you get vim inside emacs. i still use emacs for magit as it's hands down the best git gui i've seen so far.

i used to use spacemacs but just wanted a quicker startup while still being reasonably configured... doom emacs is both.

avindroth2• 3 years ago

To each their own. Minds function differently, desire different workflows, and thus are extended better with different tools.

I use both non-evil emacs and neovim, given the mood I am feeling that day. For quick and dirty things, I prefer neovim, and for more extended workflows, I prefer emacs.

But besides functional differences, the two "mediums" feel different. Neovim is clean (and hangs less in general). No bloat. Emacs is a monster, suited towards my liking (with many years of .emacs config).

But as much as I love Lisp, sometimes you want to get away from the bloat and sit quietly with a blinking cursor in vim.

nyarlathotep_• 3 years ago

which are (for some reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

AFAIK/IIRC these bindings are something to do with readline being widely used for CLI interfaces?

Additionally, they work all over OSX too (on text inputs), not just the shell--<C-a>, <C-e> for start and end of line, etc, probably lots of others too that I'm unaware of.

malodyets• 3 years ago

The some reason is the (GNU) readline library that powers most command line editing.

remexre• 3 years ago

Also, macOS seems to have copied many of them, so they're worth learning for that too IMO.

butterisgood• 3 years ago

I think of emacs as more of an operating system for emacs lisp with an in-built editor more than I think of it as an editor.

I say that because I have "live documents" that run Jira queries for me, and cross reference defects to other systems behind REST interfaces and can drive the whole thing with a few keystrokes.

(And it didn't take long to put together)

Emacs and emacs lisp, is a bit like Smalltalk in some ways too, once you get the hang of it. (and I've thought of porting that entire workflow I just mentioned to Pharo too)

xphos• 3 years ago

How did you collect such detailed statistics of your usage that's the crazy part in my opinion not that you actually switch but you have the statistics to monitor the switch!

DoingIsLearning• 3 years ago

If you've done any significant amount of contract work you get used to logging your time for multiple clients. Arguably you then grow wiser and charge per day.

leephillips• 3 years ago

I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.

pascal_wizzard• 3 years ago

Well it really depends on what operations you expect to be instant. Basic editing like movement, inserting, etc is instant, but summing from 1 to 100000000000000000000000 is where elisp would show its poor performance.

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

This is basically why I don't use intellij.

Work pays for everything, I just dont want to wait 10 minutes for an environment to change.

peterashford3• 3 years ago

I use Goland at work - which is intellij. Switching between project environments is about 2 seconds. Cold start is about 5 seconds.

Icathian• 3 years ago

People talk about its slowness, but I've got mine pretty damn kitted out and it's still faster than VSCode, VStudio, and JetBrains products. It's not as fast as vim, I'll admit, though.

rirze• 3 years ago

Recent releases have greatly improved performance.

That is, unless you're talking about launching emacs each time you want to edit a single file, then emacs won't load instantly like vi will.

tmtvl2• 3 years ago

Eh, you can run Emacs as a daemon and starting a client is pretty fast.

velox_neb• 3 years ago

I'm an emacs fan but there's no excuse. It's insane that an editor from the 1970's is perceptibly laggy on the latest Macbook Pro.

This is a good article about the problem https://discourse.doomemacs.org/t/why-is-emacs-doom-slow/83/...

all2• 3 years ago

It's still single threaded.

BeetleB7• 3 years ago

Use a vanilla config (i.e. no config), and it's pretty fast.

comonoid• 3 years ago

The first 916 days of Emacs are always the hardest.

pjkundert• 3 years ago

916 days to flatten the curve!

sanitycheck2• 3 years ago

282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config.

I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

throwawaysalome5• 3 years ago

Some guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys find they can get to B faster and more safely if they can modify the car.

dwringer• 3 years ago

Furthermore I'd say that I (presumably like most emacs users) am probably closer to 45 minutes per month, or per year, on general emacs config stuff, certainly not per day. It has still made a huge difference for me in terms of convenience and just general aesthetics.

EnigmaCurry2• 3 years ago

Its a hardly a requirement, some people just enjoy doing it. You can just use someone else's config, lots to choose from.

umanwizard6• 3 years ago

The whole point of emacs is that it’s not “fiddling with config”, it’s programming. Which is an activity a lot of people enjoy.

Emacs is essentially an IDE for developing emacs.

medstrom• 3 years ago

Plus, with time it becomes more like writing programs and less configuration. I write Elisp commands like I used to write shell scripts. These commands do entirely new things. I feel that can't count as mere configuration.

markrages• 3 years ago

In my last 20 years of using emacs, I have spent about 45 minutes total fiddling with the config. (Before that I spent a little more time getting it set up.) Am I missing out on something?

spudlyo2• 3 years ago

For me, Emacs as a Lisp programming environment is just a lot fun! I was a big fan of the iPython REPL, but always struggled with reliably reloading modules when I made changes to functions and classes. With Emacs Lisp, I don't worry about any of that. Everything is so interactive and hands-on! It's easy to change and introspect the state of the system while it's running. The built-in debugger is pretty great too. It's a really nice way to work.

Laaas• 3 years ago

That's 28k dollars to configure Emacs, if we assume 100 USD / hour...

nequo2• 3 years ago

By that argument, watching The Irishman costs 350 USD.

Scarbutt4• 3 years ago

Where's your mercedes?

sampo• 3 years ago

282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day

It's 0.43 hours a day, which is 26 minutes, not 45. (Hint: 0.5 hours is 30 minutes.)

sanitycheck2• 3 years ago

Superb point, I did always suspect I'm an idiot but it's useful to have it pointed out sometimes!

light_hue_1• 3 years ago

There's a very good reason for it. I spend about an hour every month. It sharpens your tool and pays back massively over time.

When we need to quickly debug or carry out a complex operation at work? People gather around my machine. Once you're set up with things like org-mode, magit, lsp your productivity goes up a lot.

outworlder2• 3 years ago

I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

Some people like to customize their environment to their exact specifications. Others will use whatever is available and never change it.

That is not required. Although default Emacs is pretty barebones (from a modern interface standpoint, not features) one can get a pretty good kickstart by using something like Spacemacs or Doom emacs and only sprinkling a bit of configuration here and there.

I too had a pile of config accrued over years - mostly porting features from other editors to Emacs. After adding Doom, I have just a few lines, it does all the rest.

The point is - usually on other editors you need to either wait for someone to create a "plugin" to do what you need, or you need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a small task. In Emacs, it's extremely easy to create functions that will do tasks for you. And that gets addictive.

enbugger• 3 years ago

or you need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a small task

That is what I thought when was motivating myself to continue diving into vim and emacs. In the end it turned out that the this this problem of "difficult extensibility" exists only in my head but not in VSCode or IntelliJ IDEA. Eventually, you can do magic on your files with sed/python/any other language in terminal and this most likely is better solution because it is editor-agnostic and good for automation.

layer8• 3 years ago

Plus the time for writing that blog post. ;)

warp• 3 years ago

I have four commits to my .emacs in 2022 and eight in 2021, all fairly minor. So I guess that's about 45 minutes per year on average :)

cyrialize2• 3 years ago

It's part of the fun. Once you realize how much you can do within Emacs, it becomes really easy to fiddle.

That being said, I'm also one of those people that break my Emacs config often, and I have a different version on each PC I use.

Not every user is like this though! Many try to keep their setup as stable as possible.

BeetleB7• 3 years ago

I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

The problem is in the terminology: Config

Replace the word with programming and it will all make sense. People who write Javascript code to build custom tools for their own use are doing the exact same thing as Emacs users tweaking their config.

These days when I have time I'm writing elisp to make it easier for me to write math notes. One org roam node per concept/definition/proof. However, I'm building a graph: If a definition of a math object involves prior knowledge, I want to link to those nodes. The default org roam interface makes this a pain, so I want an interface that prompts me for the title, and lets me select dependencies one by one. It then inserts the node, with links to all those dependencies.

Where does all this code go?

In my config.

peterashford3• 3 years ago

I wrote a few functions for my emacs configuration. It's simply that I wanted the editor to work differently. And I could not do that in literally any other editor.

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

When I first started using emacs I spent 10 hours a day for many months customizing it.

JohnMakin• 3 years ago

the .vimrc I've been using for like 7 years has 8 lines

taw282• 3 years ago

My emacs config is zero lines.

Scarbutt4• 3 years ago

Respect. What do you use it for?

adamc2• 3 years ago

I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange.

I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.

cyrialize2• 3 years ago

I'm in the same boat - I've used it almost daily for 7ish years at this point. It's so much fun to use and customize, but there are easier options out there.

When people find out I use Emacs I always caution them against using it. It's taken me a long, long time to be productive in Emacs. VSCode, JetBrains tools, etc. don't have the same requirement and start up time to productivity.

Buying into Emacs does give you a lot though! Emacs way of splitting panels, going through buffers, going through files, always feel better than other applications for me.

tpmx3• 3 years ago

Emacs way of splitting panels, going through buffers, going through files, always feel better than other applications for me.

Yes!

Some of the people who built GNU Emacs were legit UX geniuses.

adamc2• 3 years ago

It does. And the editor design, where almost everything of significance is just a function you can call/advise etc. from user code, makes it the most supple editor on earth. That's why I'm still there. But...

Pretty huge learning curve to adopt it.

tpmx3• 3 years ago

I've used emacs for 25+ years. I was never into LISP; I just really liked the interface. And muscle memory goes deep.

Two months ago I switched to VSCode. The "Awesome Emacs Keymap" extension by Yuichiro Tachibana made it possible:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...

It's not 100% perfect, but close enough. I'm quite enjoying using VSCode now. It's fantastic having a wealth of actually user-friendly features/extensions to choose from.

VSCode is so annoyingly cluttered/blinking/animating/popup-infested by default though. There are a lot of things to disable in the default config.

tpmx3• 3 years ago

The incremental search behavior still trips me up; it sorta works but not exactly.

Then there are a few crucial key bindings missing (like creating and closing split windows) - that seems doable without changing the core VSCode behavior.

todd8• 3 years ago

In grad school in the 80’s I used Emacs. At home around 1984 I got my first PC running MSDOS. For years I used a commercial product that used Emacs keybindings (Epsilon) because Emacs wouldn’t run on my PC.

When I went to work at IBM I was disappointed that concerns over the Gnu license forced me to use vi for a few years, but I discovered it to be great an editor for me.

I eventually was drawn back to Emacs and now, many years later, I enjoy playing with my config file every week. There is always something new to be added.

It’s org mode and magit that make it impossible to leave Emacs. (Right now I’m experimenting with a configuration where I’ve installed the top 600 most popular add on packages at once. I’m kind of using the wisdom of crowds approach to picking packages this time. Next week it will be something else.)

numbers• 3 years ago

I love posts like this. It reminds me of having fun with computers is so rewarding. Reading a post like this reminds me of being young and diving into Vim and learning new tricks with it every day!

retrocryptid3• 3 years ago

Oh man. I'm embarrassed to say I've been using emacs for almost 40 years and it probably accounts for 80% of my screen time.

I wonder how many people know emacs predates gnu-emacs? I remember being skeptical of open source until I saw what gnu emacs could do. Then I got slightly more skeptical when I looked at the code ;-)

superdisk• 3 years ago

Tell us more. What were you using before GNU?

tjr• 3 years ago

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5736

is about pre-GNU Emacs, with history of Emacs going back to the mid-1970s.

Y_Y3• 3 years ago

How many fingers do you have left?

retrocryptid3• 3 years ago

Me? I lost a finger in the great key-binding wars of the late 80s. Like I said... if you make it to your deathbed with all 9 fingers, you're not trying hard enough.

lanstin5• 3 years ago

I got less enamoured of GNU when I started reading glibc. It works and it's solving for a complex set of build constraints and so on, but wow, it is not what I'd type.

matheusmoreira3• 3 years ago

Yeah. Thank god for musl.

pabenson• 3 years ago

My entire software dev career was using emacs nearly 100% of the time. Originally it was on tops-20 (about 1981) and it was the TECO based emacs. (someone will correct me but I think Stallman was involved in the TECO version at MIT) Then the unix version used an abomination called mlisp. I briefly used EINE on lisp machines. Once Stallman got gnu going in earnest the first thing seemed to be emacs and elisp. I've been retired for a few years now so I don't type at emacs nearly as much. I feel crippled typing this into a text box in the default UI on a chromebook. Once I found control and meta on the keyboard it was all finger macros.

Anyway, I didn't do much customizing and never got used to vi when I was forced to use it. I don't think I liked the modefulness of vi. Yeah, emacs isn't very unix-y, but the unix-y text editor is ed. You kids get offa my lawn.

abhayhegde4• 3 years ago

Actually, what's the fuss about Emacs being so good? I'm a hardcore vim user to the point that I've installed Vimium for browsers, use vim on my iPad as well.

Someone please enlighten me with links, guides or just a comment as to what's in Emacs that makes it productive and special.

psd1• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/

There's a lot of non-emacs filler but it's still the best emacs e-zine

abhayhegde4• 3 years ago

I'll use Algolia and search maybe.

throwawaysalome5• 3 years ago

Plenty of google-able info to answer your question. But to wax poetic for a moment, you may think of vim as chess and emacs as baduk. You can learn chess quickly, and the game goes as deep as you're willing to go. Absorbing baduk takes significantly more time, but once you get it, it's like peering into another dimension.

sundarurfriend2• 3 years ago

baduk

(for people who don't know it by this name: this is apparently the Korean name of the board game Go.)

teddyh4• 3 years ago

Start with the official Emacs Tour: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

abhayhegde4• 3 years ago

Sure, this might help. If you've had experience, what's unique about Emacs for you?

abhayhegde4• 3 years ago

I don't know why I am being downvoted. Sorry if you smelled snark in my comment.

I am genuinely asking for an experiential guide/comment rather than a link to documentation.

kaveh808• 3 years ago

A few random Emacs thoughts...

One really nice feature of MacOS text widgets is the inclusion of basic Emacs key bindings such as C-k, C-d, C-a, etc. Brought forward from the Next days.

I used Zmacs on Lisp Machines back at MIT in the early 80's. A couple of my favorite Emacs-related acronyms are the editor EINE (Eine Is Not Emacs) and its successor ZWEI (Zwei Was EINE Initially).

I remember at one point in the late 80's using Emacs in the shell on SGI Irix workstations. No mouse support at that time for it.

Today I still use Emacs/Slime for my Common Lisp 3D graphics hacking.

codr7• 3 years ago

Yeah, thanks a lot, I just lost two hours setting up and configuring EXWM.

Very cool, makes me wonder why I didn't think of this before, I've been using Emacs since forever.

slashdev6• 3 years ago

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij?

I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know.

I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools?

Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary.

Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. Maybe. But that’s not the bottleneck anyway.

Why? Am I missing something or is it just an irrational attachment to software they learned long ago and prefer to stick with rather than learn something new?

Paul-Craft• 3 years ago

You seem to be missing that they're not actually inferior tools. I can't think of a single thing that can't be done at least approximately as easily with emacs than with VSCode and the like.

slashdev6• 3 years ago

Are they really? Do you get all the same plugins, all the lints and hover info, refactoring, jump to usages/definition, smart auto complete, etc?

They seem awfully limited to me by comparison.

pmoriarty17• 3 years ago

Things you can do inside emacs (and have all this be tightly integrated so you can copy and edit data seamlessly from one "application" to another, without leaving your editor):

- browse the web

- read/send/edit email, RSS news, usenet

- chat on IRC and other chat networks/protocols

- use org-mode to edit notes in an outline format with hyperlinks, executable code blocks, a spreadsheet, etc

- use magit, one of the most powerful git interfaces

- read and edit PDFs and LaTeX with visual LaTeX symbol substitution right in the editor

- program and configure the editor in elisp, with a whole elisp ecosystem used for every plugin (this alone would make me switch away from any other editor to emacs)

- use thousands of other scripts and plugins that are the result of 50 years of development

- absolutely everything customizable to the nth degree, as emacs is more of an editor construction kit than a mere editor

anikom15• 3 years ago

Why waste time learning about some fad IDE that will get replaced by something ‘better’ in five years? Newer text editors don’t do anything better than Vim, and they are strictly worse when it comes to their primary function: editing text.

‘You can install a vi emulator.’ - Waste of time. I already have vim.

My vimrc file still works. New machine? Just install vim and copy my vimrc over.

Emacs is a totally different experience. Emacs is essentially the interface side of an operating system. There is really no replacement for it except a UNIX command-line with a bunch of CLI tools for things like news and email that people have forgotten about.

gshulegaard• 3 years ago

I think I would rephrase this question as why would I stop using emacs for VS code and intellij? Seriously, there is no feature they have that my emacs config doesn't (AFAICT after using Intellij and VS code each for 4+ years). But I have the ability to work with emacs without ever touching my mouse. You may consider that only being "slightly" faster, but every time I use VS code, _feel_ slow because I know how fast I would have been in emacs.

Combine this with my tiling window manager and I pretty much only have to use my mouse to interact with web browsers. That's the killer feature that makes VS Code and Intellij _feel_ inferior to me.

Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that VSCode and Intellij are _actually_ inferior to Emacs. I think both are great in their own right, but after years of familiarity I have a fluency with Emacs (because of the keyboard oriented interface) that I could never have with them.

To be fair, for someone without emacs fluency I would probably steer them towards VSCode and Intellij as they are definitely more approachable. In fact, I have done exactly that for several of my friends and colleagues.

slashdev6• 3 years ago

The no mouse thing is one of the best arguments I've heard. I'm not convinced it makes it worthwhile, but I'm willing to grant it's possible.

KryDos• 3 years ago

I don't think the fact that Vim and Emacs were created a long time ago makes them inferior.

They keep developing and they are up to date with many/all programming-features. There are bunch of extensions that VScode just doesn't have despite it's huge extension store.

Also the main thing for me about these editors and especially Emacs is that you can program it. Not just configure it but actually program and do anything with it. You can hook into any piece of the code and change it. You can read the source code of any "extension" and patch it on the fly. I don't think I'm aware of any other editors that allow that.

It's huge power.

slashdev6• 3 years ago

To be clear, I'm not saying the problem is they were created long ago.

I'm saying (from my pov, which may be wrong) that they don't seem to have as good of an IDE experience. Certainly the out-of-the-box experience with emacs/vim is much worse. And the learning investment is pretty steep. But even if you configure everything as an expert would, the experience still seems lacking to me.

throwawaysalome5• 3 years ago

The argument for vi is easily made. UNIX devs are constantly diving in and out of directories, grepping, awking, and otherwise spot checking code at the shell prompt. A terminal-based editor emulsifies coding and such command line activities. The argument for emacs is less easily made, and its dwindling market share evidences that. If you're a black belt in elisp like I am, all other editors seem unusable. But you're right. If I hadn't already spent years mastering emacs, I'd likely not give emacs so much as a look.

slashdev6• 3 years ago

That's another good argument. Once you've invested the time learning everything about emacs, that's not a barrier to using it anymore, it actually kind of locks you in, since you won't have that level of familiarity in VS code or intellij (and anyway, they're not as friendly to modify.)

chlorion3• 3 years ago

Emacs is not about being lightweight or faster to type with, this seems to be a misconception that stems from it being compared with Vim. Emacs is not a modal editor, it works just like your standard text editor as far as typing and navigation go.

As for the other things, Emacs has support for many more languages than VSCode or Intellij. An example of this, is support for (g)awk, or non-posix shell scripts, lots of lisps, jq, various config file formats, and other things that aren't "hot" right now.

There are other reasons too, like Emacs being a true FOSS project, which is important to me. There are lots of other things, these are just a few ottomh.

mbork_pl2• 3 years ago

How do you know Emacs is inferior? How much time have you spent using it?

How are you sure VSCode and IntelliJ will be around in 10 years? 20 years? Why invest in learning a new tool every couple of years? How do I know MS doesn't suddenly kill VSC?

Also, why would I want to use an editor which calls home every few minutes? How can I be sure VSCode does not send my password files etc. to MS or OpenAI or whatever?

Also, Emacs extensibility and flexibility is unparalleled. I can mold it to fit _my_ workflow instead of molding myself to fit the workflow of some guys at MicroSoft.

Also, Emacs is self-documenting and has ridiculous introspection capabilities. My favorite example: do VSCode/IntelliJ have a counterpart of `view-lossage` (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mi...)?

Also, the fact that Emacs is so keyboard-oriented (as others have mentioned) is not really about _objective speed_, but _subjective feeling of friction_ (and lack thereof).

Also, working with Emacs is so much fun. It's a piece of software so helpful that it almost feels like an A.I. assistant. ;-)

So, plenty of reasons for me.

UI_at_80x242• 3 years ago

For the EMACS guru's in this thread I have a question.

How practical is EMACS for a non-programmer? My preferred environment is FreeBSD + i3WM. I'm a sysadmin, I have no programming skills so anything beyond tweaking the odd configuration file is of no interest to me.

I know that being able to write elisp is a major component of using emacs, but how usable is it without being able to write your own programs?

cvdub• 3 years ago

As a sysadmin you’re probably very tech savvy, so Emacs should be very usable for you without ever learning elisp.

This video by a self professed non-programmer about using Emacs in the broader Unix ecosystem might pique your interest enough to give it a try:

https://youtu.be/qTncc2lI6OI

UI_at_80x242• 3 years ago

Thanks, that's just what I was looking for!

wwarner• 3 years ago

recently put effort into improving my emacs environment and i love it more than ever. great things that were new to me: wgrep, native compilation, rg-mode, dir-locals, straight.el. Not new to me, but lsp and magit are still fast and intuitive. After the initial push, i haven’t had to give it much thought. To be fair, yaml-mode is still the pits.

phissenschaft• 3 years ago

I just stopped worry and succumbed to https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil. Now I only mostly just fiddle with orgmode configs to generate nice looking HTML and PDFs.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

I have used XEmacs for about a decade (1995 - 2005), to the point I still remember most stuff.

However that was only due to being in UNIX environments where IDE was a foreign word, and nothing compared to the likes of Borland offerings.

Nowadays there are plenty of IDE choices for UNIX like workloads, I don't miss Emacs, and basic VI knowledge is enough for editing configuration files on bare bones POSIX systems.

nathants• 3 years ago

emacs is a lot more fun if you explore xmodmap setups too.

i have control left of space, alt left of that. capslock is also alt, and is used for most alt presses.

916 Days of Emacs

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