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The videos touch upon a fraction of magit’s capabilities; if nothing else, it’s a far more mature project. But the real power is integration with the rest of e

The videos touch upon a fraction of magit’s capabilities; if nothing else, it’s a far more mature project. But the real power is integration with the rest of emacs/being written in elisp. If I want to change or script behaviour, I have easy access to all the internals, and I can integrate it with other parts of my emacs workflow. For example, I can use magit to view the diff of a coworker’s PR, easily capture snippets, including links to their location in our internal BitBucket instance, into an org buffer, and then write up and send an HTML formatted message with my comments, syntax highlighting, etc to my colleagues with my feedback. Similarly, my TODO list is managed by org, and I can have links to commits or files at a certain commit directly in my agenda or notes and jump to them. This is all within my editor, with all the text editing, code navigating, and linting capabilities it provides!

kungtotte 8y ago
Whenever I read a comment or blog post about Emacs I'm like "I should definitely try it out, because that sounds awesome", then I do try it and it turns out it's a pain in the ass to make it work on Windows and I spend more time fiddling with it than I do working with it. It's the same thing with vim for that matter. A basic-ish text editor setup is trivial in both editors but beyond that things start to fall apart. Plugins/modes rely on being run in *nix environments to work well, and the workarounds for Windows are never 100%. The startup times start to suffer a lot too in vim and Emacs when you pile on a lot of features. I think that's why VSCode has gained so much traction. For coding it's got easily 90% of the same features as both vim and Emacs (if not more), but it's trivial to set up and with many users being on Windows pretty much everything has first-class Windows support. So that's what happens every time. I stick to VSCode and keep a lightweight vim setup around for quick text edits since it opens instantly. Perfect for quickly changing a config file or jotting something down if I don't have VSCode open.
- mateuszf 8y ago
  Just change your OS?
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    I think it kind of proves my point when the solution to not being able to set an editor up is to change your entire OS... (Also: no)
    - earenndil 8y ago
      Your OS becomes irrelevant when emacs itself is your OS!
    - Pimpus 8y ago
      He has a point. Why complain about Emacs when the problem is Windows? To be fair, I am known to use all three OS's from time to time. I just have conditional guards to prevent loading packages that break on Windows. Mostly everything works the same. In fact, I originally learned Emacs on Windows back when I was a younger and noobier programmer.
      - kungtotte 8y ago
        The problem isn't Emacs, since the core program works fine on Windows (as does vim). Many packages for both also work just fine. But then there's that subset of packages that don't work fine. Some can be fixed with fiddling, but then you lose that Emacs thing of installing a package and be on your way (usually a point in favour of Emacs over vim I might add!). And some just can't be fixed, which leaves me either using a different editor for those needs or just not using those packages by using conditional configs. However then we run into a little peeve of mine: the reason I want to use a tool like vim or Emacs is to have the same tool working the same way everywhere. I don't want to learn and more importantly maintain two setups. I want to sync my one setup across any machine I use and have it work the same way. I also don't want to have the situation that my editor works one way on system A and another on system B.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >then I do try it and it turns out it's a pain in the ass to make it work on Windows and I spend more time fiddling with it than I do working with it. The first few times I did it on Windows it was a pain (almost a decade ago). You had to install some dependencies manually. But the last few times I did it it really was a straightforward install, with everything working out of the box (except any commands that rely on GNU tools like grep). I may have been using an unofficial port - sorry but I don't remember the link. My Windows Emacs is almost identical to my Linux Emacs. You wouldn't know you're not in Linux. That, for me, is the joy of Emacs - it behaves the same on both OS's.
  - tcoff91 8y ago
    How did you get magit to not be slow as hell on Windows? It’s brutally slow on my windows box and lightning quick on my Mac.
    - Naomarik 8y ago
      Best setup I've found was to run everything within WSL when developing on Windows and exporting emacs display to Mobaxterm's x-server for a proper emacs experience. Everything is extremely fast and I find myself using my Mac less frequently now since WSL is working very well for me.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      >How did you get magit to not be slow as hell on Windows? By using mercurial :-) Had no idea magit is slow on Windows. Any idea why?
      - nickbarnwell 8y ago
        It’s mainly due to the cost of spinning up subproccesses and certain FS operations on Windows. Magit spins up a bunch of git processes for certain operations and can be quite slow due to it. Look into fscache settings for a speedup
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    A plain vim or Emacs is trivial to set up and is indistinguishable, simple config changes are also trivial, but once you go deeper into plugins/layers for things like fuzzy file finders it starts to fall apart because they start relying on Linux-only tools or the Windows equivalent tools aren't as good. Some of it you can get to work after copious amounts of fiddling, but I don't have that kind of time or willpower. While it might not be as powerful the total amount of time I've spent actually making config changes in VSCode is probably about 30 minutes. This is including time waiting for extensions to download! Not to mention that it ships with many features out of the box such as git integration.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  > I think that's why VSCode has gained so much traction. For coding it's got easily 90% of the same features as both vim and Emacs Is that a joke? How can you possibly know this if you haven't used emacs for a start. Do you really think it has 90% of the features of a 35 year old project? If emacs is difficult to set up on Windows you should stop using it. The awesome stuff you hear about is mostly the result of using emacs on an OS that is decent for development. But if you insist on staying in your prison then you'll have to put up with what Microsoft lets you have.
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    I have used vim for god knows who long, and I've tried Emacs several times for a few months at a time before giving up. So I do think that for coding VSCode absolutely has 90% of the features that both vim and emacs offer. Note how I said "for coding"? That's not an accidental or trivial part of my comment. For writing and managing code the feature-sets are on par in all three for sure and if you disagree then I am going to suggest to you that you actually give all three a try and focus only on coding and you'll see what I mean. I should stop using Windows because a single application is difficult to set up? Throw out my entire OS with the plethora of other applications I use because a single application that has had 35 years to get its shit together simply won't work well? That's a reasonable position for sure! Developing on Windows works absolutely fine, and if you wan't to talk about prisons and what "Microsoft lets me have" how about we talk about the WSL? They have no reason to include it in Windows but they do. A whole bunch of Linux software became available over night in a native Windows environment because of something Microsoft did. The ones who are digging their heels in at this point are all the *nix developers who refuse to support Windows as a first-class platform, so talk about being in a prison! Your software only works well on a subset of all operating systems.
    - cup-of-tea 8y ago
      > a single application that has had 35 years to get its shit together simply won't work well? It's because the people that like emacs don't like Windows. You would see why if you would try something else. If you want emacs to work well on Windows, do it yourself. Nobody owes you anything.

kungtotte 8y ago

Whenever I read a comment or blog post about Emacs I'm like "I should definitely try it out, because that sounds awesome", then I do try it and it turns out it's a pain in the ass to make it work on Windows and I spend more time fiddling with it than I do working with it. It's the same thing with vim for that matter. A basic-ish text editor setup is trivial in both editors but beyond that things start to fall apart. Plugins/modes rely on being run in *nix environments to work well, and the workarounds for Windows are never 100%. The startup times start to suffer a lot too in vim and Emacs when you pile on a lot of features. I think that's why VSCode has gained so much traction. For coding it's got easily 90% of the same features as both vim and Emacs (if not more), but it's trivial to set up and with many users being on Windows pretty much everything has first-class Windows support. So that's what happens every time. I stick to VSCode and keep a lightweight vim setup around for quick text edits since it opens instantly. Perfect for quickly changing a config file or jotting something down if I don't have VSCode open.

mateuszf 8y ago
Just change your OS?
- kungtotte 8y ago
  I think it kind of proves my point when the solution to not being able to set an editor up is to change your entire OS... (Also: no)
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Your OS becomes irrelevant when emacs itself is your OS!
  - Pimpus 8y ago
    He has a point. Why complain about Emacs when the problem is Windows? To be fair, I am known to use all three OS's from time to time. I just have conditional guards to prevent loading packages that break on Windows. Mostly everything works the same. In fact, I originally learned Emacs on Windows back when I was a younger and noobier programmer.
    - kungtotte 8y ago
      The problem isn't Emacs, since the core program works fine on Windows (as does vim). Many packages for both also work just fine. But then there's that subset of packages that don't work fine. Some can be fixed with fiddling, but then you lose that Emacs thing of installing a package and be on your way (usually a point in favour of Emacs over vim I might add!). And some just can't be fixed, which leaves me either using a different editor for those needs or just not using those packages by using conditional configs. However then we run into a little peeve of mine: the reason I want to use a tool like vim or Emacs is to have the same tool working the same way everywhere. I don't want to learn and more importantly maintain two setups. I want to sync my one setup across any machine I use and have it work the same way. I also don't want to have the situation that my editor works one way on system A and another on system B.
BeetleB 8y ago
>then I do try it and it turns out it's a pain in the ass to make it work on Windows and I spend more time fiddling with it than I do working with it. The first few times I did it on Windows it was a pain (almost a decade ago). You had to install some dependencies manually. But the last few times I did it it really was a straightforward install, with everything working out of the box (except any commands that rely on GNU tools like grep). I may have been using an unofficial port - sorry but I don't remember the link. My Windows Emacs is almost identical to my Linux Emacs. You wouldn't know you're not in Linux. That, for me, is the joy of Emacs - it behaves the same on both OS's.
- tcoff91 8y ago
  How did you get magit to not be slow as hell on Windows? It’s brutally slow on my windows box and lightning quick on my Mac.
  - Naomarik 8y ago
    Best setup I've found was to run everything within WSL when developing on Windows and exporting emacs display to Mobaxterm's x-server for a proper emacs experience. Everything is extremely fast and I find myself using my Mac less frequently now since WSL is working very well for me.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    >How did you get magit to not be slow as hell on Windows? By using mercurial :-) Had no idea magit is slow on Windows. Any idea why?
    - nickbarnwell 8y ago
      It’s mainly due to the cost of spinning up subproccesses and certain FS operations on Windows. Magit spins up a bunch of git processes for certain operations and can be quite slow due to it. Look into fscache settings for a speedup
- kungtotte 8y ago
  A plain vim or Emacs is trivial to set up and is indistinguishable, simple config changes are also trivial, but once you go deeper into plugins/layers for things like fuzzy file finders it starts to fall apart because they start relying on Linux-only tools or the Windows equivalent tools aren't as good. Some of it you can get to work after copious amounts of fiddling, but I don't have that kind of time or willpower. While it might not be as powerful the total amount of time I've spent actually making config changes in VSCode is probably about 30 minutes. This is including time waiting for extensions to download! Not to mention that it ships with many features out of the box such as git integration.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
> I think that's why VSCode has gained so much traction. For coding it's got easily 90% of the same features as both vim and Emacs Is that a joke? How can you possibly know this if you haven't used emacs for a start. Do you really think it has 90% of the features of a 35 year old project? If emacs is difficult to set up on Windows you should stop using it. The awesome stuff you hear about is mostly the result of using emacs on an OS that is decent for development. But if you insist on staying in your prison then you'll have to put up with what Microsoft lets you have.
- kungtotte 8y ago
  I have used vim for god knows who long, and I've tried Emacs several times for a few months at a time before giving up. So I do think that for coding VSCode absolutely has 90% of the features that both vim and emacs offer. Note how I said "for coding"? That's not an accidental or trivial part of my comment. For writing and managing code the feature-sets are on par in all three for sure and if you disagree then I am going to suggest to you that you actually give all three a try and focus only on coding and you'll see what I mean. I should stop using Windows because a single application is difficult to set up? Throw out my entire OS with the plethora of other applications I use because a single application that has had 35 years to get its shit together simply won't work well? That's a reasonable position for sure! Developing on Windows works absolutely fine, and if you wan't to talk about prisons and what "Microsoft lets me have" how about we talk about the WSL? They have no reason to include it in Windows but they do. A whole bunch of Linux software became available over night in a native Windows environment because of something Microsoft did. The ones who are digging their heels in at this point are all the *nix developers who refuse to support Windows as a first-class platform, so talk about being in a prison! Your software only works well on a subset of all operating systems.
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    > a single application that has had 35 years to get its shit together simply won't work well? It's because the people that like emacs don't like Windows. You would see why if you would try something else. If you want emacs to work well on Windows, do it yourself. Nobody owes you anything.