16 ms·

Why GNU Emacs?

• calibraxis 11y ago
  "Doing just one thing and doing it well" -- which is better at this, Unix programs or Emacs functions?
  • eru 11y ago
    At least Unix programs don't suffer from dynamic scope. (Unless you use bash to glue them, of course.)
    • rekado 11y ago
      There are some instances where dynamic scope actually is not as insane as it may seem. Although the paper is probably dated and opinions have changed since then I can still understand that there are practical reasons to dynamic scope in some instances: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html#SEC18 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html#SEC18 All my own Elisp code uses lexical scoping by default and I don't trust myself enough to use dynamic parameters liberally in my code. But I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to have the ability to dynamically override internals.
      • eru 11y ago
        Oh, definitely. Even extremely statically minded Haskell offers a dynamic scoping construct: the reader monad. (As Haskell is wont to do, this monad infects every user of it with a `tag', just like IO does. No silent surprises from dynamic scoping here.)
        • mbrock 11y ago
          Implicit parameters, too.
• officialchicken 11y ago
  Different people like different things, OK? A 40 year old flamewar is boring and old. Just let it die. [1] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/986/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-vim-and-emacs http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/986/what-are-the-pro...
  • treve 11y ago
    Can someone not write an article about a technology they love? There was no flaming in there.
  • to3m 11y ago
    I think this is a misreading of the article!
    • rekado 11y ago
      Indeed! I was actually raised by a pack of vims, and I like both editors. I used to use evil-mode in Emacs for a while until I reset my muscle memory by switching to dvorak. I have no interest in old flame wars. Our generation has its own set of flame wars to fight ;)
  • Syssiphus 11y ago
    Why? It's the only real fun we have.
• bjackman 11y ago
  I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this: Emacs does have a great text editor, and it's Vim! With evil-mode you can use all the Vim bindings you're used to (including sed commands with ':'), but with the added benefits (and drawbacks) of Emacs! I've also found that fiddling with my .emacs is really fun, fiddling with .vimrc was usually quite frustrating.
  • dorfsmay 11y ago
    I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.
    • massysett 11y ago
      After a day of editing on Emacs on a MacBook Pro, my hands felt like they were going to shrink and stick into a contorted state. So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get. Ironically a modern laptop is well-suited for Vim, as vi worked on primitive terminals--laptop keyboards don't have a lot of keys and they are poorly positioned. The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards. So these days I am back to Vim and have been finding plugins to make up for the things that Emacs has that Vim doesn't. vim-dispatch is a decent replacement for M-x compile.
      • TYPE_FASTER 11y ago
        Reconfiguring OS X to substitute control for caps lock really helped me. Yes, many keyboards had them swapped physically some time ago. Here's an example of a keyboard from a Sun workstation: http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg
      • greenyouse 11y ago
        I had this problem a few years ago when I switched from Vim to Emacs. You could try writing your own evil-leader shortcuts for common commands + major mode commands. It initially takes a day or two to set up basic commands (like buffer switching, commands for your favourite programming language, and REPL stuff) but after that there's minimal tweaking to do. For less commonly used commands you usually can do M-x [command-name] or just memorize a random Emacs keybinding. In the end I thought it was 100% worth it for working in LISP dialects like Clojure, Scheme, and Common LISP. The good REPL integration and the ability to control everything makes Emacs pretty fun.
• pklausler 11y ago
  Emacs is a fine editor to use until you write your own. It's the only way to make your primary interactive tool work exactly the way that you think it should.
  • jnpatel 11y ago
    That's a hefty endeavor. Care to share more about your experience writing your own?
    • maw 11y ago
      I think pklausler means that, out of the box, emacs is decent but, over time, you slowly mold it into something that is more truly yours. That's been my nearly twenty year experience with emacs.
      • pklausler 11y ago
        I am glad that you have enjoyed your use of emacs, but no, I was being literal. A text editor is not a complicated piece of software to write from scratch.
        • thinkpad20 11y ago
          I guess 7100 lines of C might sound simple to some, but that sounds pretty complicated to me! :)
    • createuniverses 11y ago
      Live coding environments typically include a text editor. Sometimes as in the case of Praxis, its possible to change the behaviour of the text editor while you use it. https://github.com/createuniverses/praxis https://github.com/createuniverses/praxis I wrote it for myself mainly, so a lot of the features are undocumented and hidden away. But you can have a look at fnkeys.lua, editor.lua and keymap.lua to get a general idea. These are in prods/syntax2015continued. You can bring these up in praxis and make whatever changes you like to the live system. I like the idea of making it keyboard and buffer driven to an extreme, like the Commodore 64. For example, one simple technique I like is to "inject" code into the current buffer to place objects: function makeCamPosSaver() local x,y,z = getCamPos() x = math.floor(x) y = math.floor(y) z = math.floor(z) local s = "setCamPos("..x..","..y..","..z..")" print2(s) end Then calling makeCamPosSaver injects a bit of code that will move the camera back where it was when you called it. Another example: pressing F3 creates a new buffer where you are supposed to fill in a string with what you are searching for. When you run that buffer, it will switch to the old one that spawned it, and move the cursor to the next occurrence of the search string. There are more creative ways to use this that others could come up with I'm sure.
• blahdeeblah 11y ago
  Pro tip: Nobody else cares what text editor you use.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • hellcow 11y ago
    Why do people feel compelled to create new accounts just to leave snarky comments like this?
    • agumonkey 11y ago
      This is what text editors will do to a person.
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        No, that's web browsers.
• avar 11y ago
  Nowadays the only thing I use outside of Emacs is GNOME Terminal / Google Chrome / bash / screen / ssh. All the rest (including E-Mail) is inside Emacs. The Emacs/Vim war is a bit silly, because historically they're really not comparable in that way (although vim has gotten larger). Emacs is more of an alternative to GNOME/KDE/Windows/OSX than it is an alternative text editor.
  • Scarbutt 11y ago
    I think the war has move from "Emacs vs Vim" to "Emacs and Vim vs all others".
  • elviejo 11y ago
    "how have times changed before the enemies were Emacs vs Vi. Now Emacs and Vim are allies against visual studio and eclipse." read long ago in Hnews comment.
    • pjmlp 11y ago
      They were already so in the 90's. While at the university I had to settle with Emacs, because there wasn't any IDE available that could offer me the experience Borland tools had.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I like to view it as the Cold War - Emacs and Vi being the superpowers, and the rest struggling to get by ;).
  • gkya 11y ago
    "Nowadays the only thing I use outside of Emacs is GNOME Terminal / Google Chrome / bash / screen / ssh. All the rest (including E-Mail) is inside Emacs." There are ansi-term, shell, and eshell. The first is an actual ansi-term within your emacs, the second is a comint shell, and the third is a shell implemented in elisp. Emacs has frames, and with C-u M-x shell you can open as many new shells as you want. proced is like top/ps aux. So it's time to get rid of gnome terminal and screen :)
• flogic 11y ago
  Apparently, I'm feeling ranty today... <rant>I've used Vi and Emacs as my primary editor. Now I've moved on to Sublime Text 3. Despite being powerful tools Vi and Emacs have probably harmed the state of Unix text editing. They've kept antiquated UIs from before keyboards were an text editing UIs were standardized. It's kinda sad that MS Dos, Windows and MacOS have all had a plethora of powerful editors with convenient standard user interface meanwhile the Unix world is anchored to Vi and Emacs. It seems like they've managed to starve out a good chunk of innovation on this front.
  • FenugreekAcerb 11y ago
    Yeah or you should install Atom and be spied by Google Analytics [1]. Let's take the creepiness of the web to the desktop. [1]: https://atom.io/faq https://atom.io/faq
    • WizardOfTheWest 11y ago
      Thankfully, for Arch and Arch derivatives, the AUR package removes this before building. https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=atom-editor https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=atom-...
    • merpnderp 11y ago
      I've found VS Code a great alternative to Atom for that level of editor (fast and light). Don't tell me it does something equally as awful?
      • dopu 11y ago
        You should know better; it's made by Microsoft. However, like with Atom, you can disable telemetry: https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/supporting/FAQ#_how-to-disable-crash-reporting https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/supporting/FAQ#_how-to-di...
  • kstrauser 11y ago
    I went from Emacs to Sublime and back to Emacs. The UI could be improved, maybe, but there's a lot to be said for knowing that your editor will still exist next year. I'm frankly not confident in ST3, but I'm 100% certain that Emacs will be there. But beyond that, I find that a lot more stuff Just Works in Emacs. I spend my days working in Python, and both major Python modes for Emacs are miles ahead of ST's equivalents. Things like linters work as expected and there are lot more packages available for niche things. Emacs is subjectively better, even if the UI doesn't feel as platform-native as other editors. I don't use Emacs because I'm a graybeard afraid to learn something new. I use it because I've tried every new hotness to come along and I've yet to find something as powerful, well-supported, and ubiquitous.
• jake-low 11y ago
  Once, I used Emacs. All I did with it was play in the land of elisp. I never got any real work done. Then, a passionate friend converted me to Vim. I only ever used it to do battle with my .vimrc. I never got any real work done. Now, I use Atom. Click a button, install a feature. No more distractions. I wish it were faster though; I can never get any real work done.
  • agumonkey 11y ago
    pen and paper my friend. punched cards even.
  • taeric 11y ago
    This doesn't make sense. You used to be someone easily distracted by yak shaving, is what it reads like. Installing features in Emacs is not exactly tough, either. I do think you can get distracted by the sea of things you can install. Probably no different from the new toys in the realm.
    • spion 11y ago
      Makes sense to me. I love both emacs and vim, but I agree there are too many yaks to be shaved to get them in a usable state.
      • taeric 11y ago
        I question the lack of shaving in the next application. Seems there is always something that could have been done a different way.
  • noelsusman 11y ago
    The features just aren't there for me in Atom. I have a feeling they are if you're a web developer, but us non webdevs are left out in the cold (at least for now). Compare LaTeX and R in Atom to AUCTeX and ESS in Emacs and it's like night and day. Every time I switch to Atom I get frustrated within a day due to lack of features for the things I use.
  • 11y ago
• jontammeh 11y ago
  Emacs is in one sense the canonical computer program. A "historical landmark" of computing, the internet, and our industry. It's grown, it's still viable and used heavily. Even if you don't use it, it's sort of the Aristotle of computer programs - we owe it a lot.
• rakel_rakel 11y ago
  The boilerplate argument against emacs is getting kinda old, isn't it? I used vim exclusively for ~5 years up until last summer when I switched to emacs which I use in more or less the same way, edit something, ctrl-z out to the shell, fix something, fg back to emacs etc... I find the ~2 second startup time for the times when I don't run it as a daemon negligible, and imho it's easily worth it at least if you make use of some of the more powerful editing modes. Also the lacking a decent text-editor joke is just that, a joke :S
  • qnaal 11y ago
    > Also the lacking a decent text-editor joke is just that, a joke well, noone's saying that viper-mode couldn't be improved
    • rekado 11y ago
      Or `evil-mode`. (I prefer `god-mode` as I have Emacs keybindings in muscle memory and the vim bindings slowly fade from memory.)
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    SSDs are magic. I've pretty much stopped noticing Emacs startup time after I switched to them.
• losvedir 11y ago
  > Sometimes people who use computers ask me why I would use something as “bloated” as Emacs for text editing. Usually they remark that Emacs is a hold-over from a by-gone era, much too large compared to editors like “vi”, and that they are quite content using a variant of vi or some Notepad-like editor. This feels like a very out of date sentiment to me. I know a decade ago this was the perception, and well know the "good operating system, bad text editor" joke you'd see on Slashdot or whatever. But nowadays while Emacs clocks in at a dozen MB, it's still smaller than what I'd consider "light weight" editors like ST3 and Atom, and minuscule compared to the likes of IntelliJ, Eclipse, or XCode.
  • sklogic 11y ago
    Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
    • melling 11y ago
      That fits in level 3 cache these days: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-i7-nehalem-cpu,2041-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-i7-nehalem-cpu,204...
      • trothamel 11y ago
        Yes, but if you want to do something else with your computer, you'd have to swap it out to proper RAM.
        • JoachimS 11y ago
          You mean like how it normally works? Of course it will be swapped out - into the GBytes of memory you oomputer is equipped with.
    • JoachimS 11y ago
      Yes, that was very funny - about 20 years ago. On my current machine (OSX w 16 GByte RAM), Emacs built with Homebrow as native GUI application (HEAD, lots of bells and extras enabled) with 10+ buffers Emacs consumes 127 MBytes. In comparison, Finder consumes 300+ MByte, Firefox 2+ GBytes and Slack(!) 500+ MBytes. And the Activity Monitor utility supplied by Apple I used to check these numbers uses 130 MBytes. Yes, Emacs consumes 8 MBytes and more. But Moore's law has really fixed that problem. And in comparison with a lot of other SW, Emacs is not the SW application I would accuse for being bloated, quite the opposite in fact.
• infodroid 11y ago
  Many Emacs advocates fall for the trap of apologizing for why Emacs is not Unixy, as though it were some sort of defect. They should celebrate the fact that Emacs doesn't come from the Unix tradition of small, composable tools and "doing only one thing and doing it well". It is rooted in the ambitious work of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, the LISP programming language, and the single user MIT Lisp Machine that essentially booted up to a LISP REPL.
  • gkya 11y ago
    Unix has a big flaw: through the pipes pass random data. It's up to the receivers to interpret it. Lisp gives you the possibility to easily structure your data and pass it around, plus the ability to pass programs around. Other than this, the unix way and the lisp way are nearly parallel, though in lisp "command line utility" is called a "procedure".
    • pjmlp 11y ago
      Hence why I love the idea of REPL as shell as used in the Xerox PARC and ETHZ OSes. Only Powershell comes closer to how this was used.
      • qznc 11y ago
        Every (Unix/terminal) shell is a Read-Eval-Print-Loop. The difference is the data structure which is passed around. Is it bytes, Cons, or objects?
        • pjmlp 11y ago
          No, every UNIX shell is a poor Read-Eval-Print-Loop when compared to what Xerox PARC machines allowed in terms of interaction with the running OS. UNIX shells don't allow to call functions declared in .so, execute scripts applied to elements selected with the mouse, apply functional algorithms over data. Well, you can write external commands in another programming language, but then it isn't a REPL anymore.
        • 11y ago
• agumonkey 11y ago
  Emacs grabbed my attention soon [1], I used to spend a huge amount of time on almost all aspects of it. Now, I don't care[2]. Turns out editors are a waste of time, at least if you consider them so[3]. Brilliant algorithms are short in characters. That said, Emacs is a full fledged system giving you a lot[4], if you're willing and able to use that lever you'll be happy. Lastly, Emacs survived for decades, it can swallow most interesting ideas that comes (ligthtable ? checked https://github.com/Fuco1/litable https://github.com/Fuco1/litable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNO-vgq3Avg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNO-vgq3Avg). ---- [1] It's syntactic system is powerful enough to feel different and more solid (important) than other editors at the time (before Eclipse and IDEA). It was repl-friendly, another factor that talked to my mind. [2] It's still the 2nd most used program on my machine after chromium .. maybe even a tie. [3] Learn hard things, fundamentals (parsing, compilation, optimization, paradigms), learn how to help yourself (see G.Bernhardt talk about unix chainsaw[3]) in all possible ways. [4] its open keybinding trie is still something that I miss in most programs and I try to port a subset of it everytime I design a UI. It's also based on a lisp, so enjoy using alien tools from the future. Btw, its git interface (magit) blows Eclipse one out of the water for instance, most people wouldn't suspect how efficient it is compared to heavy 'pro' tools.
• ktamura 11y ago
  Any Acme users here?
  • tujv 11y ago
    Sam user if that counts.
  • autoreleasepool 11y ago
    Which acme user are you, Russ or Rob?
    • ktamura 11y ago
      Neither, actually. In fact, I don't even consider myself to be a programmer (Although I routinely write scripts of sorts)
• flyrain 11y ago
  I'm a Emacs user and use it everyday. I've seen a post like this from time to time. Most of them make sense, and I indeed agree on it. But from my personal experience, I prefer Clion to write C/C++, prefer IntelliJ to write Java. I will not recommend Emacs for these coding job. A modern IDE is doing a much better job. I still love the org-mode of Emacs though.
• ksk 11y ago
  I find it interesting that we as programmers love to base a lot of our technical decisions on hard data, but somehow the choice of editors seems immune to this. Has anyone ever done an analysis of the actual objective benefits of these editors? I got suckered into the 'religion' of vi and have spent countless hours learning it to a fairly high level of proficiency over the years. I don't think I've ever recovered all the time I spent. Maybe it requires a special use case. Most of my time is spent outside of the editor - reading specs/docs/code, debugging/tracing/analyzing existing code, or just thinking about code.
  • rekado 11y ago
    > Most of my time is spent outside of the editor - reading specs/docs/code, debugging/tracing/analyzing existing code, or just thinking about code. Most of my time is spent inside the "editor" (Emacs). Reading docs is in Emacs, debugging is in Emacs, too. Thinking about code is assisted by `M-x zone`... :) To be able to stay in the same application in which I can use my home-grown features on everything that can be mapped to text buffers is an advantage; a subjective advantage, maybe. I don't need to switch contexts as often any more, and my brain thanks me for that. I grew up on vim and got very comfortable with it, but elisp, interacting with inferior processes, and the overflowing kitchen sink in general slowly replaced my combination of vim+xmonad+tmux+terminal.
    • ksk 11y ago
      Ah, well I guess you're the lucky one :) For me, most of the material that I need to reference is PDFs/Slides from talks/Books/Web pages/My own hand written notes/etc - basically stuff that is not plain-text. Luckily I have a multi-monitor setup, so I don't really pay any penalty to switch contexts. But keeping all that aside. As far as just the editing is concerned, all the advanced features in vi and such do help if you're typing out reams of code - something which I never find my self doing. I suppose the obvious unstated thing here is that people have been productive in all sorts of environments, from notepad to pico to visualstudio to vi. From personal experience I find my self agreeing a lot more with people who say it doesn't matter _that_ much.
• Tistel 11y ago
  lisp is beautiful. The crown jewels of computer science. getting to spend time with it reminds you that programming can be fun (and profound) while you are being paid to work with some awful drudgery language solving some stupid problem. Being close to lisp, in this way, is like being at the same party as Audrey Hepburn. It reminds you of grace.
  • snaky 11y ago
    Joel Moses has been credited with coining the phrase in the 1970s APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.
    • progman 11y ago
      > Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp. Such claims are usually made by people who haven't discovered the power of Lisp yet. http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html
      • lispm 11y ago
        In this case, Joel Moses could easily know more about Lisp than we both together... probably he speaks from deep experience.
      • snaky 11y ago
        Such claims are usually made by people who haven't discovered the beauty of APL yet.
        • progman 11y ago
          APL is actually beautiful. Watch the development of Conways game of life in APL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
• maccard 11y ago
  I'd love to get started using emacs, but it's extremely difficult. I want to use it to write c++ on Windows. I'd like to have autocompletion support, and navigation support on a large project (>1million lines). I have yet to manage to get it set up. If it were more straightforward to set up and use, more people would use it I'm sure.
  • hodwik 11y ago
    Agreed. I tried for a good portion of last night to get it setup for Clojure, and it was surprisingly difficult.
  • Scarbutt 11y ago
    Maybe this could help: http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html
    • maccard 11y ago
      That's great looking. I'll give it a go today!
• melling 11y ago
  Emacs and vim allow extreme customization for precision editing and navigation: http://howivim.com/2016/damian-conway/ http://howivim.com/2016/damian-conway/ https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AceJump https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AceJump Worrying about startup time is the wrong problem. You want to optimize for keystrokes, for example. More work, less typing.
• thinkpad20 11y ago
  I've been an emacs user for the last year or so. Previously, I'd used Sublime Text, which I think is a fantastic editor. I loved its speed and especially its simplicity -- pretty much everything just works right out of the box, configuration is managed through JSON instead of some obscure imperative language, etc. But ultimately I really needed two things: the ability to use it over SSH, and the ability to run a terminal inside of it. (ST has a third party shell plugin but it's frankly terrible). So much of my work involves either SSHing into a machine to do work, or rapidly alternating between a shell and an editor. The frustration of having to fumble my way through emacs or vim every time I SSH'd into a remote machine, or having to hackily arrange windows side-by-side so that I could get ST next to a terminal, ultimately became too much and I decided to just start using Emacs. At this point, I'm reasonably proficient at emacs. From the sound of it, I'm nowhere at the level of the author of this article. But at least I'm comfortable with the essentials -- copy/paste, find/replace, nagivation, etc, and I can easily accomplish the two things I missed from ST (though I'm getting increasingly fed up with the shortcomings of ansi-term, and I might just switch to using tmux). Unfortunately, what I've lost is the simplicity. I find emacs lisp to be a horrible language. I find it ironic that a platform built on a functional language like lisp manages to produce some of the most complex and incomprehensible compositions of state, as different packages interact with each other in a non-deterministic way, or one package will simply hijack the editor and freeze/crash it, or refuse to let you enter input because a plugin can't parse your buffer, etc. Have some weird behavior in your editor? How can you tell which plugin is causing it? No one knows. It's really quite unpleasant at times. Maybe vim would be better, or maybe not, but learning vim would mean a period of being woefully unproductive or frustrated. It's irritating that the only choices for terminal-based editors are either embarrassingly under-featured (nano, pico, etc) or require a ton of learning to become proficient in (emacs, vim). On the other hand, there are several GUI-based editors which are powerful and easy, but none of them work in a terminal, nor do they provide a terminal emulator of their own. :(
  • muraiki 11y ago
    I found http://vim-adventures.com/ http://vim-adventures.com/ (no affiliation) to be the best way to finally learn vim in the sense of actually developing automatic muscle memory. It teaches you how to use vim using a 2d game. It's worlds better than the built in vim tutorial, to say the least. :) For a really different take on editors+shells, check out acme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
• bunkydoo 11y ago
  I love EMACS, partially because of those zippy the pinhead quotes that can be evoked with the 'M-x yow' command
• ebbv 11y ago
  This article seems to assume that people who criticize Emacs don't understand that Emacs isn't a monolith, and that the various features are modules. I'd guess the majority of people who say "Emacs is bloated" do get this. The author fails to understand what people really mean by this criticism. I'll just speak for myself here, because that will make phrasing easier; the point is that for me a text editor doing most of the things the author describes (running shells, handling email, todo lists, etc.) makes no sense. For me, a text editor should first and foremost be a great text editor. Secondarily it can be nice to have integration with Git or other tasks that are intimately related to the files I'm going to be editing with the editor. But why would I ever want my editor to do all those other things? I have a window manager for that. Or at least a shell. The comparison of Emacs to a shell kind of illustrates my point; a shell only exists to facilitate managing of files and processes. It being able to run any command you want is its whole purpose. Emacs was originally an editor, and the community grew its capabilities from there. (I'd argue that it grew during an era where it having so many modules with so many capabilities made more sense than today, but that's another conversation.) The comparison of Emacs to a web browser is better than the comparison to the shell. But this comparison still misses the mark, because browser based apps have several advantages (and disadvantages) over native apps, they are fundamentally different because of the technologies involved. Using Emacs to do things like email, manage your shell sessions, etc. is a bit different from running another mail client, or running separate shell processes, etc. but they are not fundamentally different from each other in the same way. Whether you're running Emacs locally or remotely, you can run separate mail clients, etc. the same way. Anyway, my point is not that Emacs has no reason to exist, but it comes down to this; personal preference. The only reason to use Emacs the way the author does is because you like it.
• jhoechtl 11y ago
  Given the whopping size of Atom, I really wonder why anybody would call Emacs big. Emacs was just ahead it's time.
• desireco42 11y ago
  I use both Emacs and Vim and Emacs is slow. Often I would issue commands too fast for Helm to pick it up. It has rich environment and a lot going for it, but it is slow. Excuse to have "full featured" environment does not stand because Sublime Text is very much full featured and very fast. Anyhow, while Vim is still my goto editor, Emacs has a lot going for it and I fire it up when I work on Elixir because of superior support. Org mode is nice.
  • nine_k 11y ago
    This entirely depends on the set of packages you configure. I was able to make vim plenty slow by running too many plugins over too many files. I made vim lightning-fast by keeping things simpler. I did both of the same to emacs. Actually, advanced IDEs like Idea only feel fast because they do most of the stuff asynchronously. Afaict neither vim nor emacs are excessively good at it.
• sprash 11y ago
  If you are a newcomer and look at Emacs what you see at first glance on the outside is basically total crap. The default behavior of Emacs distinguishes itself by the complete lack of sanity. Emacs key-bindings are neither ergonomic nor do they make any sense in any way. They are barely consistent across modes, only if you are lucky. They are the way they are because they are old. And old people don't like change. However my experience was, the more I learned the more crap appeared. One layer of crap after the other. At first everything could somehow be fixed with a lot of configuration and scripts. I needed several hundred lines of Lisp code in my init.el just to be able to work normally. But then the lowest emacs layer of crap appears which can not be fixed. It includes issues like lack of multithreading, elisp being the least capable and at the same time by far slowest lisp dialect. Stuff like the lack of ability to move the cursor off screen. Inherent jumpiness while scrolling which can not be fixed and really strains my eyes. And don't even try to look at the C source, it is the worst historically grown ifdef hell you will ever experience. And finally there is the community which lacks disposition to unify or work together. It is more like a community of loners where each of his own produces personal "modes" which are inconsistent to use and most of the time conflict which each other. The most important reason for this might be lisp itself. It is inherently hard to read other peoples lisp code. So everybody writes his own.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• rl3 11y ago
  Does anyone have an opinion on Spacemacs[0]? I haven't used it, nor Vim/Emacs. Just came across it during researching the two. Spacemacs appears to have excellent documentation though. [0] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/
  • 001spartan 11y ago
    I've been a vim user for a few years (I wouldn't consider myself a power user, though). I switched to Spacemacs last year, and I don't regret it at all. The power of the Emacs ecosystem mixed with excellent hotkeys (on top of vim's better keybinds already) is a formidable combination.
  • Barrin92 11y ago
    I switched from vim to spacemacs a few weeks ago and I don't regret it. The fact that you can run a shell in a buffer, have on the fly syntax checking and so on makes coding much more comfortable and you feel like you're using a full blown ide instead of just a text editor. Would recommend
    • arvinsim 11y ago
      Funny that, I also did the same exact thing this month for org-mode. I never missed Vim.
  • TurboHaskal 11y ago
    I wholeheartedly recommend it. I was a Vi(m) user for years. I love vi as a concept, but extending it always felt very wrong and cumbersome for me, whereas in Emacs it all feels natural as it truly is the extensible, customizable text editor. org-mode and slime made me pull the trigger and kept using it for half a decade. Then I lost my Emacs config. Installed Spacemacs and never looked back. It gives you better defaults, a good community and a framework that lets you easily extend it in a more modular way using layers. It's also much gentler on my wrists. I still use nvi for quick edits though.
• wangii 11y ago
  I try Emacs around once per year. The problem is it's so slow under OSX. It's much faster on my 2007 iMac running Linux than 2013 mbp. I even tried to run it under X-Quartz but still performed poorly. What can I do?
  • DigitalJack 11y ago
    Turn up the limit on garbage collection made a big difference for me. I'll post my .emacs.d on github and reply here. I'd only make a personal recommendation for emacs if you were doing Clojure development. Emacs+Cider+clj-refactor puts everything else to shame. Otherwise I'd just say use atom or sublime or whatever ide.
    • DigitalJack 11y ago
      repository, as promised. https://github.com/scottstackelhouse/emacsd.git https://github.com/scottstackelhouse/emacsd.git
    • pmoriarty 11y ago
      Just fyi, I also have huge issues with helm performance on my system. I tried the (setq gc-cons-threshold 100000000) from your init.el, and it didn't help at all. I'm running emacs 24.5.1 with a recent helm on a 2-core 64-bit Linux system with 8 gigs of RAM. Bringing up helm-mini takes about 7 seconds for me, as does getting a response from helm-apropos when I type a single character or even type control-g to close it. The rest of emacs runs fine. It's only helm that has anything remotely like this severe performance problem.
      • DigitalJack 11y ago
        I've never used helm, so I don't have any experience there. I can't say that I've felt like I'm missing anything by not using it though. I'll give it a try on my system, maybe that will give some insight. -- update -- I installed a bunch of helm stuff, it didn't slow anything down for me. try doing a clean pull from my repo and then adding your helm packages and see if that helps. emacs starts up in about 1.2 seconds for me.
• tetheno 11y ago
  Emacs+Org-Mode can be an incredible platform for personal information/knowledge management and quantified self.
• hydandata 11y ago
  ...Click a button, or invoke a command and an empty, unremarkable rectangle appears. Little you know that it is a relic from an age long past... Emacs to me, first and foremost, is a doorway to another dimension, a place you can escape to from the absolute drudgery of the contemporary software development. ...A relic, yes, but it seems as alive as ever, a dark block inside it, blinking, like a pulse on a medical instrument... It is also a glimpse into what professional tools might be like, if they were not so obsessed about beginner users. [1] ...You wonder what the hell you should do with it... [1] I think Erik Naggum kind of nailed it in http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3065048088243385@naggum.no.html http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3065048088243385@naggum....
• kop316 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, I have tried Vi and Emacs, but the CLI text editor I have gone back to is GNU nano. Am I missing something?
  • dllthomas 11y ago
    You are missing some things, yes. A more capable editor is well worth some time invested. I'd recommend learning whichever of vi and emacs is better represented amongst those you can easily go to for guidance. If you choose vi, I also recommend http://vim-adventures.com/ http://vim-adventures.com/ - I have only played through the free bit, but if the quality is consistent I expect it's worth paying for if you want to learn vim and have a bit of fun while you're at it.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • rekado 11y ago
    It depends on what you want to do and what you expect. As I wrote in my blog post, Emacs is more to me than just a text editor, just like a browser is more to many people than just an HTML viewer. I don't use Emacs on the command line; I use a graphical instance. I usually only have two programmes open: Emacs and a graphical browser (eww still needs some work). Being able to use my very own Emacs that has been molded according to my habits for pretty much every task is a great feature, but it only becomes obvious after some time of continued usage.
• j0e1 11y ago
  Long live Emacs! It just C-w 's all competition.
• arvinsim 11y ago
  I just recently moved from Vim to Spacemacs. I was looking for a TODO list application that would work on plain text. This led me to org-mode. Fortunately, I discovered Spacemacs when trying to find a plugin that would emulate Vim keybindings in Emacs. All I can say is WOW!. I get to keep all the modal editing goodness of Vim while getting the excellent, well documented functions of Emacs. I also like it that the commands are Vim-like(doing a sequence of keys using a leader key instead of key chords).
• tomphoolery 11y ago
  Calling Vim my "editor" is really doing the rest of the programs that actually make up my development environment a huge disservice. Vim might be what I use to edit text, but the rest of "Unix" is my IDE of choice. Being able to tab between an IRC/chat client, my email client, a shell, and an open instance of Vim is a huge advantage for me. So up until recently, I never had a need for Emacs...looking at it as too much of an investment into re-building all the features that are in my shell configuration. That's when I discovered Org Mode. I love Org Mode. It's become my primary note-taker, todo list, and general idea dump. I've used it to plan out projects for work, tours for my band, and to write down essential things I need to get done each week. Syncing to MobileOrg over Dropbox, and keeping my Org files in a synced documents folder, means that all of my computers have access to the same information at all times. I tried using vim-orgmode for a long time but most of the features that seemed the most useful to me just weren't supported. Why screw around with VimL when I could just download Spacemacs, configure Solarized and Monaco to at least get it looking like Vim, and then use that just for Org Mode? That's what I've been doing, and I have to say I've fallen in love with how fast I could get packages up and running and with how many great features seemed just "built in".
• soraminazuki 11y ago
  Why should people use emacs to run applications when the shell already does that just fine? Just use the shell and you can run applications in any language you want rather than having to stick with elisp. If you want to constantly switch between applications, you can use tmux or simply your terminal emulator's tabbing functionality. You can even switch between GUI applications instaneously if you use a tiling window manager like XMonad.
  • rekado 11y ago
    Emacs is my shell. You don't have to stick to elisp either, you just need a little elisp glue. (The Emacs interface for the GNU Guix package manager, for example, is written in Guile Scheme for the most part.) Emacs is trivially extensible and whatever I make it do can be used in other sub-applications. I can evaluate code wherever I want and change the system at runtime. It's quite a different feel compared to having "unglued", ununified applications.
• e40 11y ago
  What I think is funny is people making fun of me for reading email in Emacs. I use my own filtering system built on top of MH-E, which is layered on top of nmh command line tools. MH-E uses GNUS for MIME handling and I'm able to view HTML messages just fine. Why I think it's funny: people laugh that I'm using 20-30 year old technology and new tech would serve me better. To each of them I say: I challenge you to an efficiency dual/bet. Pit your system against mine. When I show them actually what I use, they don't take the bet. Yes, what I'm using was first written almost 30 years ago, but I've tuned the crap out of it (with my own tweaks) and so have others, improving the tools themselves. The only thing that would make my life easier would be if nmh could use IMAP. There have been many discussions of this, but it's just not a natural fit. I don't know if it will ever be done. EDIT: typos
  • snaky 11y ago
    People often tend to confuse the newer with the better.
• mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I also love Emacs. I bought an original Emacs Manual for Richard Stallmam (late 1970s?) and still spend a ton of time inside Emacs every day. I do,use other editors like TextMate and GEdit and the JetBrains IDEs sometimes. Right tool for the job. Emacs really excels for Lisp languages, for me that is Haskell, Common Lisp, Clojure, and Scheme.
• yarrel 11y ago
  Because it's awesome.
• craigds 11y ago
  I'm a recent ST3 to Atom convert. I've used all sorts of text editors with a shell inside them, and I can't quite fathom why you'd want to do that. What's wrong with bash running in iTerm? Then it's a first-class citizen of your desktop instead of a subprocess of a subprocess of a thing running inside another thing running in the one terminal window you're using for everything. I've tried using vim and emacs a few times, but I can't quite get to grips with the whole modal editor thing. Feels like a whole huge learning curve just for the sake of it, getting in the way of actually getting things done. My operating system is a perfectly good operating system, I don't need emacs for that. On the odd occasion when I need to edit something on a remote server (this is very rare, cos ansible/puppet) I'm quite happy using nano. It has zero learning curve (no modes) and the few shortcuts you do need are marked on the bottom of the screen. Yes it's kind of featureless, but you shouldn't be editing things on your servers anyway.
• cryon 11y ago
  Emacs have been my main editor for 15 years soon and while it definitely got some rough edges, once you learn all basic key-combinations for editing and buffer management (which often is even more uncomfortable with a non us keyboard layout) I feel that nothing else really compare. Text editing is great but as many have pointed out the extensibility and all the high quality community projects/modes out there make emacs something unique. I don't think it's wrong to regard emacs more as an elisp environment than an editor. The biggest problem with emacs right now as I see it is the lack of multi-threading.
• amasad 11y ago
  I switched to emacs a year ago and I love it. I feel a lot more productive when everything I need is in single window. However, just recently, I started feeling what used to be minor RSI to be a major discomfort. There are days where I can't type at all. I don't know if emacs' key bindings is mainly to blame here, but it seems like it. evil-mode have been recommended to me but I'm hesitant because I never liked vim's key bindings.
  • qb45 11y ago
    > I never liked vim's key bindings. How... dare you? Did you really try? What's wrong with them? I'm finding vi mighty fine. I switched my shells to vi mode and hate going back. Maybe you need to try Dvorak, I have to admit I've never used vi on QWERTY :)
    • amasad 11y ago
      hah, I did try it multiple times. In total I think I suffered through it for 3 months. No progress :/
  • rekado 11y ago
    I recommend God mode. On my Thinkpad X200S I bind the mode switcher key to the right mouse button, which is easily reached by the right thumb. With God mode you don't have to relearn key bindings, you just no longer need to hit Control and Alt. https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode
    • amasad 11y ago
      This looks amazing, thank you!
  • progman 11y ago
    The first thing every Emacs user should learn is how to customize key bindings. With global-set-key you can assign arbitrary keys (function keys etc.) to arbitrary commands. Of course you have to learn Elisp for that but that's not too hard. It is worth the effort to learn the basics of Elisp if you want to become really productive in Emacs. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Key-Binding-Commands.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ke... Emacs is the most advanced programmable editor ever, and that's the reason why it is still alive. I use it every day for almost thirty years. Of course I don't use the default configuration but a very conventient custom one. In Unix you just need to know just two editors - Emacs and vi. Vi because it is the default editor on every Unix platform. At first vi's key bindings looked crazy but after a while they felt just natural.
• miseg 11y ago
  http://www.sachachua.com http://www.sachachua.com is the blog of an avid Emacs user who promotes its use, and the plus is that there's a lot more interesting information there too as she documents her journey.
• yoanizer 11y ago
  Do you really think choosing between vim, emacs, textmate, sublime, etc is going to make such a big difference in the end result?
  • rekado 11y ago
    To me the answer is "Yes". What is the "end result"? Is it just a text file containing characters in the desired order? Is the journey at all important or is all that matters reaching the goal? I have a feeling that most people commenting here have not actually read my blog post; or maybe I failed to get my point across. Comparing Emacs with other text editors is a different topic. I hardly even mention text editing in the blog post. Using Emacs for text editing is what I do because I'm already using Emacs for everything else (or was it the other way around?). It makes a difference for me because I can use the same malleable system for everything that can be mapped to some text representation. Emacs modes enhance that text representation, make it alive (e.g. hyperlinking in man pages, shells in Emacs, REPL interactions, M-x compile, etc).
• pandeiro 11y ago
  It just amazes me that programmers would use anything else.