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MIT went with the Berkeley editor. A lost opportunity to introduce programmers to the beauty of using Emacs and Lisp.

rsfinn 8y ago
Can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. Perhaps the expectation is that those things will be acquired naturally; certainly I was immersed in both within two weeks of arriving at MIT. (Admittedly that was in the latter half of the Carter administration; things may be different these days.)
snazz 8y ago
I’m sure a not-insignificant portion will move on to Evil mode. Vim -> Emacs is a better direction than Emacs -> Vim, because you’ll learn the more efficient editing style, then have access to the better environment, instead of getting used to the great Emacs environment minus the Vim keybindings, and feeling constrained by losing this when moving on to Vim.
- joseph8th 8y ago
  I think this is true. I learned the Emacs keybindings and now they're muscle memory. I can't transfer that to Vim, but I could have transferred the other way and be proficient in two great editors. Nobody wants to die on Emacs Keybindings Hill, even diehards like me and my pinky.
komali2 8y ago
But almost all IDEs and editors have a VIM mode - learning VIM is a good way to teach people how to keep their fingers on home row, and the skill is (because of what I stated previously) easily transferred to whatever editor you like. From my perspective, I tried to learn Emacs, and decided it's a great editor, once you spend weeks to months to get it actually "working good," and learn shitloads of commands (let alone keybindings). Given my initial goal was "keep hands on home row," it was far, far faster/better for me to spend 3 days learning/memorizing VIM commands, installing a vim plugin into VScode, and just doing that. Would love to use Emacs, but it's a nightmare to set up. I still haven't managed to get it feature parity with vscode.
- VonGallifrey 8y ago
  > Would love to use Emacs, but it's a nightmare to set up. Maybe you would like spacemacs then? It is a Configuration Bundle for Emacs focusing on "Evil Mode" (aka the Vim emulator in Emacs). It is just a few minutes to install and if you already familiar with vim then there should not be much change what the normal editor usage is concerned. Of course the customization is Emacs lisp which has a bit of a learning curve, but just to get started with Emacs and evil you don't really need to customize anything.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  I wouldn't say Emacs is "a nightmare to set up"; rather, it's a continuous process of learning and improving. Getting Emacs installed and running should hopefully be easy (e.g. via your OS package manager). After that I think it mostly comes down to coming up with workflows that you're comfortable with, building muscle memory and gradually introducing new things to see whether or not they stick.
Symmetry 8y ago
As an MIT alum I was sort of surprised they went with vim over Emacs too. MIT is almost the Vatican of lisp, after all. I sort of felt like an apostate for switching over to vim there.
joseph8th 8y ago
When I took C at University of New Mexico, and later Data Structures and Algoithms from the same professor, Emacs was required. Period. He even provided a download of his .emacs file (still tucked into my init.el). He also stressed make, gdb and valgrind ("It's not fully clean until it's valgrind clean.") No emphasis on git, but I used it anyway. A decade later, and my Emacs easily surpasses most VS Code features. A decade later. Heh. Co-workers use VS Code OOTB and I'm like, "Yeah, but can you tangle or play Tetris?!" Truth is, whatever works for you and gets out of your way is the right tool. I'm invested and happy with Emacs, but also I get why it's not the first choice for a lot of devs. Even though it should be. :)

Can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. Perhaps the expectation is that those things will be acquired naturally; certainly I was immersed in both within two weeks of arriving at MIT. (Admittedly that was in the latter half of the Carter administration; things may be different these days.)

snazz 8y ago

I’m sure a not-insignificant portion will move on to Evil mode. Vim -> Emacs is a better direction than Emacs -> Vim, because you’ll learn the more efficient editing style, then have access to the better environment, instead of getting used to the great Emacs environment minus the Vim keybindings, and feeling constrained by losing this when moving on to Vim.

joseph8th 8y ago
I think this is true. I learned the Emacs keybindings and now they're muscle memory. I can't transfer that to Vim, but I could have transferred the other way and be proficient in two great editors. Nobody wants to die on Emacs Keybindings Hill, even diehards like me and my pinky.

komali2 8y ago

But almost all IDEs and editors have a VIM mode - learning VIM is a good way to teach people how to keep their fingers on home row, and the skill is (because of what I stated previously) easily transferred to whatever editor you like. From my perspective, I tried to learn Emacs, and decided it's a great editor, once you spend weeks to months to get it actually "working good," and learn shitloads of commands (let alone keybindings). Given my initial goal was "keep hands on home row," it was far, far faster/better for me to spend 3 days learning/memorizing VIM commands, installing a vim plugin into VScode, and just doing that. Would love to use Emacs, but it's a nightmare to set up. I still haven't managed to get it feature parity with vscode.

VonGallifrey 8y ago
> Would love to use Emacs, but it's a nightmare to set up. Maybe you would like spacemacs then? It is a Configuration Bundle for Emacs focusing on "Evil Mode" (aka the Vim emulator in Emacs). It is just a few minutes to install and if you already familiar with vim then there should not be much change what the normal editor usage is concerned. Of course the customization is Emacs lisp which has a bit of a learning curve, but just to get started with Emacs and evil you don't really need to customize anything.
chriswarbo 8y ago
I wouldn't say Emacs is "a nightmare to set up"; rather, it's a continuous process of learning and improving. Getting Emacs installed and running should hopefully be easy (e.g. via your OS package manager). After that I think it mostly comes down to coming up with workflows that you're comfortable with, building muscle memory and gradually introducing new things to see whether or not they stick.

Symmetry 8y ago

As an MIT alum I was sort of surprised they went with vim over Emacs too. MIT is almost the Vatican of lisp, after all. I sort of felt like an apostate for switching over to vim there.

joseph8th 8y ago

When I took C at University of New Mexico, and later Data Structures and Algoithms from the same professor, Emacs was required. Period. He even provided a download of his .emacs file (still tucked into my init.el). He also stressed make, gdb and valgrind ("It's not fully clean until it's valgrind clean.") No emphasis on git, but I used it anyway. A decade later, and my Emacs easily surpasses most VS Code features. A decade later. Heh. Co-workers use VS Code OOTB and I'm like, "Yeah, but can you tangle or play Tetris?!" Truth is, whatever works for you and gets out of your way is the right tool. I'm invested and happy with Emacs, but also I get why it's not the first choice for a lot of devs. Even though it should be. :)