4 ms·

In which way in an IDE you can't start coding straight away? I always start coding straight away in Idea or Visual Studio.

• qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  shrugs There's a different workflow. I always feel like I'm fighting the IDE, the instant I do anything that is even slightly off the beaten path. And they're complicated: everything about the IDEs that I've used seems to be an overcomplicated mess of settings, options, and menus, whereas in emacs, I could just put a single config option into my init.el to do what I want instead of jumping through all those hoops just to get to the setting. This is a problem compounded by the fact that Java, the only language I've used in an IDE, has a complicated development environment and multiple complex build systems, meaning you HAVE to fiddle with things to a fairly large extent. To further things, it's rare for an IDE to be as programmable and configurable as emacs, or even close. It's considered above and beyond the ordinary to write extensions for most IDEs: the job of an extension is to add some big feature, like support for a new programming language. My first emacs "extension" was a simple function that wrapped around some actions I found myself constantly using in sequence, so I could type one command sequence instead of six. It wasn't something I wanted to dedicate a macro to, I just wanted a command to exist that would do what I wanted. And then, 5 minutes later, I had one.