6 ms·

Surprised to see no mention of spacemacs[1] so far - you get the evil keybindings with the helm user interface. [1] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/

lilactown 9y ago
I tried out Emacs when I started learning Clojure (through Clojure for the Brave and True[0]) and didn't find it at all usable. Remembering the various chords was at best obnoxious and at worst, a huge productivity loss. It felt like it would take weeks or months before I was even close to productive. Later, I tried picking it up again, but this time chose spacemacs. Hoooly crap, what a difference. 1. Discoverability. The helm UI is better than any docs, since it's there when and where I need it to find the thing. It also provides the ability to search for arbitrary commands, which is great when you're learning a new mode or layer. 2. Modal editing. I wasn't a vim user before, but spacemacs has converted me over to the modal editing camp. It makes a ton of sense now and is a joy to use alongside Emacs' power. 3. The layer system is way easier to use than ELPA directly and takes most of the pain of configuring packages away. For someone who wanted the power of Emacs without having to touch the insides, spacemacs is wonderful and has fully converted me over to using it everyday! [0]: https://www.braveclojure.com/ https://www.braveclojure.com/
- pasabagi 9y ago
  What actually is the power of emacs? I just ask because with vim, I can easily describe why I like it - it has about a billion cool and useful text-editing features arranged in a way that makes them easy to use. I understand Spacemacs replicates basically all of these features - but what's emacs adding to this? I've tried spacemacs several times, and each time I've been stopped by not really being able to find anything, aside from org-mode, there's nothing there that justifies the (relatively) slow loading times and generally heavier overhead of emacs.
  - lilactown 9y ago
    Great question. For me, Emacs ended up taking the place of a number of tools I use daily: 1. Text editing (obviously). spacemacs provides nearly any nifty trick that vim would give you for text editing (and like I said, I'm a believer in the way of modal editing). 2. HTTP client. Emacs has a package called "restclient" that allows you to write what amount to cURL commands - in plain text, with documentation - and execute them in-line within my editor. Other teams I've been on use Postman, which is great, but I like the fact that I can save the file and commit it alongside our services/tests/etc. 3. Note taking & task lists. Org-mode is Emacs killer app. Honestly, I'm still pretty fresh to this whole "being organized" thing. But already I'm finding myself writing more and more notes, TODOs, etc. and it's really helping me on a new project that is complete chaos right now. 4. Clojure IDE. Cursive for IntelliJ comes close, but nothing beats the experience of doing Clojure development in Emacs. Since my team adopted it as our daily workhorse language, I've never had a moment where I wanted to leave Emacs. It's integration with the REPL and LISP in general makes it the most powerful programming environment I've used to date (YMMV). There might be more... the point is that Emacs is more like an application platform than a text editor, and it has some really powerful applications that have been developed for years. I now have this strange urge to do more and more inside of Emacs, if only because it gives me a common interface into my workflow. EDIT: Forgot, magit for doing git operations. Great interface and I only (very very rarely) need to drop down to terminal to do things now.
    - smellf 9y ago
      So I've never really used emacs... but I'm not really sure I understand why a text editor would need all these things? Like, why do you want an HTTP client in your text editor when you already have wget, curl, nc, etc available in your shell? It kind of sounds like emacs was incorporating anything remotely related to it before systemd came along and made it cool.
      - lilactown 9y ago
        That's why the joke "Emacs is a great OS, if only it had a good text editor," lives on and has a kernel of truth. It's really not a text editor, it's a LISP VM. It also does actually have a pretty good text editor out-of-the-box. It's why the vim vs. Emacs "war" isn't really a fight over text editing, but an ideological battle of "one tool that does one thing well" vs. "one tool that has everything I ever need." Personally, I find integration a huge selling point, and the Unix pipe interface leaves a lot to be desired. Writing some elisp code, or (preferably) installing a well-documented layer/package, is preferable to me. The specific tools I need also happen to be well supported in the Emacs ecosystem.
notheguyouthink 9y ago
I've been addicted to Kakoune[1] for about a year now. My only complaint is it's a bit short on language specific features, due to the small community. I really should try Spacemacs. I'm quite curious to see how the two mentally compare. For me a huge thing about Kakoune is seeing the selections ahead of time - Vim always had me guessing at what a delete (or w/e) action is going to do. Kakoune makes that so nice.
- eppsilon 9y ago
  [1]: http://kakoune.org/ http://kakoune.org/
jtth 9y ago
I wanted to love it but it takes longer than Atom to start up on a new iMac.
- endisukaj 9y ago
  You are supposed to use it with emacsclient. You run spacemacs as a daemon the first time and just connect to it all the subsequent times.
- weaksauce 9y ago
  If you run Emacs daemon it will start up fast anytime you need to use it.

lilactown 9y ago

I tried out Emacs when I started learning Clojure (through Clojure for the Brave and True[0]) and didn't find it at all usable. Remembering the various chords was at best obnoxious and at worst, a huge productivity loss. It felt like it would take weeks or months before I was even close to productive. Later, I tried picking it up again, but this time chose spacemacs. Hoooly crap, what a difference. 1. Discoverability. The helm UI is better than any docs, since it's there when and where I need it to find the thing. It also provides the ability to search for arbitrary commands, which is great when you're learning a new mode or layer. 2. Modal editing. I wasn't a vim user before, but spacemacs has converted me over to the modal editing camp. It makes a ton of sense now and is a joy to use alongside Emacs' power. 3. The layer system is way easier to use than ELPA directly and takes most of the pain of configuring packages away. For someone who wanted the power of Emacs without having to touch the insides, spacemacs is wonderful and has fully converted me over to using it everyday! [0]: https://www.braveclojure.com/ https://www.braveclojure.com/

pasabagi 9y ago
What actually is the power of emacs? I just ask because with vim, I can easily describe why I like it - it has about a billion cool and useful text-editing features arranged in a way that makes them easy to use. I understand Spacemacs replicates basically all of these features - but what's emacs adding to this? I've tried spacemacs several times, and each time I've been stopped by not really being able to find anything, aside from org-mode, there's nothing there that justifies the (relatively) slow loading times and generally heavier overhead of emacs.
- lilactown 9y ago
  Great question. For me, Emacs ended up taking the place of a number of tools I use daily: 1. Text editing (obviously). spacemacs provides nearly any nifty trick that vim would give you for text editing (and like I said, I'm a believer in the way of modal editing). 2. HTTP client. Emacs has a package called "restclient" that allows you to write what amount to cURL commands - in plain text, with documentation - and execute them in-line within my editor. Other teams I've been on use Postman, which is great, but I like the fact that I can save the file and commit it alongside our services/tests/etc. 3. Note taking & task lists. Org-mode is Emacs killer app. Honestly, I'm still pretty fresh to this whole "being organized" thing. But already I'm finding myself writing more and more notes, TODOs, etc. and it's really helping me on a new project that is complete chaos right now. 4. Clojure IDE. Cursive for IntelliJ comes close, but nothing beats the experience of doing Clojure development in Emacs. Since my team adopted it as our daily workhorse language, I've never had a moment where I wanted to leave Emacs. It's integration with the REPL and LISP in general makes it the most powerful programming environment I've used to date (YMMV). There might be more... the point is that Emacs is more like an application platform than a text editor, and it has some really powerful applications that have been developed for years. I now have this strange urge to do more and more inside of Emacs, if only because it gives me a common interface into my workflow. EDIT: Forgot, magit for doing git operations. Great interface and I only (very very rarely) need to drop down to terminal to do things now.
  - smellf 9y ago
    So I've never really used emacs... but I'm not really sure I understand why a text editor would need all these things? Like, why do you want an HTTP client in your text editor when you already have wget, curl, nc, etc available in your shell? It kind of sounds like emacs was incorporating anything remotely related to it before systemd came along and made it cool.
    - lilactown 9y ago
      That's why the joke "Emacs is a great OS, if only it had a good text editor," lives on and has a kernel of truth. It's really not a text editor, it's a LISP VM. It also does actually have a pretty good text editor out-of-the-box. It's why the vim vs. Emacs "war" isn't really a fight over text editing, but an ideological battle of "one tool that does one thing well" vs. "one tool that has everything I ever need." Personally, I find integration a huge selling point, and the Unix pipe interface leaves a lot to be desired. Writing some elisp code, or (preferably) installing a well-documented layer/package, is preferable to me. The specific tools I need also happen to be well supported in the Emacs ecosystem.

notheguyouthink 9y ago

I've been addicted to Kakoune[1] for about a year now. My only complaint is it's a bit short on language specific features, due to the small community. I really should try Spacemacs. I'm quite curious to see how the two mentally compare. For me a huge thing about Kakoune is seeing the selections ahead of time - Vim always had me guessing at what a delete (or w/e) action is going to do. Kakoune makes that so nice.

eppsilon 9y ago
[1]: http://kakoune.org/ http://kakoune.org/

jtth 9y ago

I wanted to love it but it takes longer than Atom to start up on a new iMac.

endisukaj 9y ago
You are supposed to use it with emacsclient. You run spacemacs as a daemon the first time and just connect to it all the subsequent times.
weaksauce 9y ago
If you run Emacs daemon it will start up fast anytime you need to use it.