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"There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool." As an Emacs user, I agree with this. The author's preference for more tools
by patrickmay 9y ago
"There’s a way in which you could say that Emacs is a place whereas vi is a tool."
As an Emacs user, I agree with this. The author's preference for more tools and fewer immersive applications still resonates with me because I see Emacs as a place for all the tools I need for development and writing.
- nextos 9y agoThat's true. Emacs is a platform, a virtual Lisp machine. The Web is another platform. Plus our OS plumbing, usually Unix. Understanding my computer this way has brought me a lot of sanity. I only use a tiling window manager (xmonad), Emacs, a browser (firefox) and a Unix terminal (urxvt). Previously I was trying to move most of my computing into pure Unix CLI. While it was fast and simple, I found most ncurses applications (e.g. mutt, remind, irssi) do not really compose as well as simple Unix programs do (e.g. wc, grep, xargs). Moving everything to elisp packages instead (e.g. org, notmuch, magit), where all elisp nicely blends together has been a great improvement. Plus dealing with configuration in a functional way, by switching to NixOS.
- dleslie 9y agoIndeed; Emacs is a place that I take with me wherever I go, because it adapts to wherever I put it with little to no configuration on my part. My tools come with me wherever I go, not unlike a travelling caravan.