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I'm a pretty hardcore Emacs user, and I'll just come right out and say it: I hate Emacs. However, the only thing I hate more than Emacs is anything else. I tr

I'm a pretty hardcore Emacs user, and I'll just come right out and say it: I hate Emacs. However, the only thing I hate more than Emacs is anything else. I tried to move to Atom, because I've heard good things, I read you could extend it in JS and that sounded good to me. The difference between customizing Emacs and customizing Atom could not be more night and day in my experience. Emacs is like a living thing, as crazy as that sounds. I feel the urge to make a slight customization to a key (which happens often) I just ask Emacs what function the key is executing and either wrap it in a custom function, or advise the function. I usually write and eval these customizations in the scratch buffer. Meanwhile, Atom makes me restart to get any changes detected. There wasn't any live documentation system that I could find (which is something I can't fathom not having now). Emacs, in terms of customization, is simply light years ahead of absolutely everything else. It's absurd to me that we're still stuck with it because seemingly nobody who wants to make a text editor has learned the lessons it has.

shalabhc 9y ago
Over at howl.io we're building an editor that's live editable like emacs. You can eval snippets of lua or moonscript code and they take effect immediately.
- soapdog 9y ago
  Is the windows 10 version stable yet?
SPBS 9y ago
I'm curious, then what makes you hate Emacs?
- Blackthorn 9y ago
  I'm not him, but I have the same opinion. Emacs doesn't play super well with others. You can do a lot of things in emacs, but you can't do emacs in other things. On the occasions that I'm writing Java, I find IntelliJ to be super awesome. But I get annoyed because the editor in IntelliJ is not emacs. I'd like to be able to do things I can do in emacs in IntelliJ. Realistically, that means replacing the IntelliJ editor with emacs, but at the moment that isn't really possible. Some things you can use emacs for, like editing web forms (I used to do that with an extension in Firefox), but emacs is really not so great at being used in other programs. As far as emacs itself, the somewhat crappy GUI rendering precludes creating an IntelliJ like experience.
  - taeric 9y ago
    I can't help but feel this is a shortcoming of some of the other apps you are naming. In particular, if they played well with $EDITOR then this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, everyone almost always finds their own way of rendering the text editor portion of what they are doing. Consider, your concern could just as easily be shifted to complaining about IntelliJ. Why can't I easily call out to it to get the information it knows?
    - r-w 9y ago
      That’s why language servers are in vogue.
      - taeric 9y ago
        And to be fair, if you view UNIX as the IDE, it fits with the idea of small programs working well together. GLOBAL actually gets pretty friggin close to perfect for code exploration in most languages. I haven't tried the latest completions modes. Mainly because I just haven't bothered setting it up. It is borderline terrifying to me to see how reliant on ridiculously powerful and integrated IDEs some folks have become.
    - Blackthorn 9y ago
      IntelliJ's GUI is 65535x better than Emacs's GUI. I'd rather have Emacs as the editor in IntelliJ than Emacs trying to deal with whatever information IntelliJ is providing.
      - taeric 9y ago
        Doesn't change my assertion, though. If we want to hold up Emacs as being more embedable and playing more nicely with other programs, that same bar can be set for the other programs. And this is largely up to each person. I personally loathe the IDEA GUI. And most any GUI. I will grant that they do better screenshots, but I will take what is effectively a super powerful terminal buffer any day.
lucaspiller 9y ago
I’m in a pretty similar situation with Vim. I don’t hate it, but compared to modern editors like Atom and Sublime I feel like I’m missing out on some features. Things like visual find and replace through a whole project, tight integration with Git, looking a lot prettier (even with a true colour terminal) make me a bit envious. And sometimes Vim just feels slow and laggy to me (I tried Neovim briefly but didn’t notice any difference). Vim is very powerful so although it hasn’t got features like visual blocks, you can do pretty much the same thing with macros and shortcuts - as long as you know and remember them, but that’s the tricky part... Somethings it would be nice just to click a menu to find that feature you use one a month. I tried switching to Atom but then got lost and felt it was no way near as powerful as Vim out the box (even with the Vim plugin), so here I am stuck with Vim :-)
- termhn 9y ago
  I would say try VSCode with the Vim plugin. VSCode is much snappier than atom, the Vim plugin is quite good, the configuration files are easy to edit, built-in awesome git integration and project-wide search, and amazing plugin support. I moved from a super custom Vim to VSCode and I'm pretty damn happy most of the time.
- notzorbo3 9y ago
  > Vim is very powerful so although it hasn’t got features like visual blocks Vim has visual blocks? Ctrl-v. Did you mean multiple cursors?
- kirjavascript 9y ago
  vim has visual find and replace across a whole project https://github.com/eugen0329/vim-esearch https://github.com/eugen0329/vim-esearch
jonathanstrange 9y ago
Lack of an intuitive and really good live help system is my main quirk with all editors, including Emacs. Of course, they all have some included help systems, but they tend to be slow to load (the worst!) or kind of cumbersome. I don't particularly like Emacs help system, for example. It shows you generic documents and it takes too much time to look things up. If you're writing an editor and want to include a special feature, please consider an online help system that -- allows you to view help about the mode and keyboard settings immediately by one keypress - with absolutely zero delay, at any time and ideally fullscreen - and return to exactly where you were before you looked up the documentation -- optionally shows you continuous online help during your editing (like e.g. the contextually most important keybindings while you're editing)

shalabhc 9y ago

Over at howl.io we're building an editor that's live editable like emacs. You can eval snippets of lua or moonscript code and they take effect immediately.

soapdog 9y ago
Is the windows 10 version stable yet?

SPBS 9y ago

I'm curious, then what makes you hate Emacs?

Blackthorn 9y ago
I'm not him, but I have the same opinion. Emacs doesn't play super well with others. You can do a lot of things in emacs, but you can't do emacs in other things. On the occasions that I'm writing Java, I find IntelliJ to be super awesome. But I get annoyed because the editor in IntelliJ is not emacs. I'd like to be able to do things I can do in emacs in IntelliJ. Realistically, that means replacing the IntelliJ editor with emacs, but at the moment that isn't really possible. Some things you can use emacs for, like editing web forms (I used to do that with an extension in Firefox), but emacs is really not so great at being used in other programs. As far as emacs itself, the somewhat crappy GUI rendering precludes creating an IntelliJ like experience.
- taeric 9y ago
  I can't help but feel this is a shortcoming of some of the other apps you are naming. In particular, if they played well with $EDITOR then this wouldn't be an issue. Instead, everyone almost always finds their own way of rendering the text editor portion of what they are doing. Consider, your concern could just as easily be shifted to complaining about IntelliJ. Why can't I easily call out to it to get the information it knows?
  - r-w 9y ago
    That’s why language servers are in vogue.
    - taeric 9y ago
      And to be fair, if you view UNIX as the IDE, it fits with the idea of small programs working well together. GLOBAL actually gets pretty friggin close to perfect for code exploration in most languages. I haven't tried the latest completions modes. Mainly because I just haven't bothered setting it up. It is borderline terrifying to me to see how reliant on ridiculously powerful and integrated IDEs some folks have become.
  - Blackthorn 9y ago
    IntelliJ's GUI is 65535x better than Emacs's GUI. I'd rather have Emacs as the editor in IntelliJ than Emacs trying to deal with whatever information IntelliJ is providing.
    - taeric 9y ago
      Doesn't change my assertion, though. If we want to hold up Emacs as being more embedable and playing more nicely with other programs, that same bar can be set for the other programs. And this is largely up to each person. I personally loathe the IDEA GUI. And most any GUI. I will grant that they do better screenshots, but I will take what is effectively a super powerful terminal buffer any day.

lucaspiller 9y ago

I’m in a pretty similar situation with Vim. I don’t hate it, but compared to modern editors like Atom and Sublime I feel like I’m missing out on some features. Things like visual find and replace through a whole project, tight integration with Git, looking a lot prettier (even with a true colour terminal) make me a bit envious. And sometimes Vim just feels slow and laggy to me (I tried Neovim briefly but didn’t notice any difference). Vim is very powerful so although it hasn’t got features like visual blocks, you can do pretty much the same thing with macros and shortcuts - as long as you know and remember them, but that’s the tricky part... Somethings it would be nice just to click a menu to find that feature you use one a month. I tried switching to Atom but then got lost and felt it was no way near as powerful as Vim out the box (even with the Vim plugin), so here I am stuck with Vim :-)

termhn 9y ago
I would say try VSCode with the Vim plugin. VSCode is much snappier than atom, the Vim plugin is quite good, the configuration files are easy to edit, built-in awesome git integration and project-wide search, and amazing plugin support. I moved from a super custom Vim to VSCode and I'm pretty damn happy most of the time.
notzorbo3 9y ago
> Vim is very powerful so although it hasn’t got features like visual blocks Vim has visual blocks? Ctrl-v. Did you mean multiple cursors?
kirjavascript 9y ago
vim has visual find and replace across a whole project https://github.com/eugen0329/vim-esearch https://github.com/eugen0329/vim-esearch

jonathanstrange 9y ago

Lack of an intuitive and really good live help system is my main quirk with all editors, including Emacs. Of course, they all have some included help systems, but they tend to be slow to load (the worst!) or kind of cumbersome. I don't particularly like Emacs help system, for example. It shows you generic documents and it takes too much time to look things up. If you're writing an editor and want to include a special feature, please consider an online help system that -- allows you to view help about the mode and keyboard settings immediately by one keypress - with absolutely zero delay, at any time and ideally fullscreen - and return to exactly where you were before you looked up the documentation -- optionally shows you continuous online help during your editing (like e.g. the contextually most important keybindings while you're editing)