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Because most people are more concerned with what they are making, than spending time pissing about learning how to work out and set up an editor that has 40 yea

Because most people are more concerned with what they are making, than spending time pissing about learning how to work out and set up an editor that has 40 year old UX. Things like VSCode and Sublime are clean and accessible, and allow you to start producing and coding quickly and painlessly.

chimprich 8y ago
A 40 year old UX is a UX that has had 40 years of refinement iteration applied to it. "Accessible" is a fine goal, everything else being equal, but for something I spend so much time in, I look for maximum potential power in my editor. Compare graphical desktops and the Unix command line.
- accatyyc 8y ago
  Now now, I use Emacs myself but I wouldn’t call its UX “refined”. It’s loads of stuff piled on top of eachother and many built-in packages to do the same thing (since everything had to be backwards compatible). Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this." I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.
    - accatyyc 8y ago
      Hehe, thanks for the laugh! Yeah, I can totally relate. In fact, to become effective in Emacs I had to start by reading a book (Mastering Emacs, can totally recommend if you ever decide to try again!) and then spending _a lot_ of time fighting configurations. Even now that I’m very comfortable in Emacs I occasionally spend hours to just get a package working correctly (recently it was lsp-mode, which looks like the solution to many problems with Emacs, but I could never get it to work). So yeah, I can’t really tell you it will be worth it productivity wise to learn Emacs, but for me it has gotten to the point that configuring it is a lot of fun and sort of replaces hobby programming projects for me.
      - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
        I try occasionally because I'm pretty sure that eventually I would get to a place where Emacs would be astounding. (Or Vim, lest any partisans think I haven't given it a shot.) I just so far haven't quite gotten over that hill. But someday. (Ironically, I spend most of my professional editing time -- which involves writing documentation in Markdown, not coding -- in BBEdit, because while there are a lot of coding editors that do more than it does, it has a few features for text slicing and dicing that I just haven't seen duplicated anywhere else.)
nukeop 8y ago
That might be true if you're an occasional developer but if you're putting in 8 hours a day for years you're going to want to have your tools tailored to you very closely.
- antihero 8y ago
  My tools are tailored to me closely. Anyway, typing the code out is such a small part of coding.
fxfan 8y ago
Just because there's one obnoxious person doesn't mean you have to unnecessarily, and in this case, wrongly, insult a great tool. I'm a vim user and obviously don't have patience for typing alt-shift+, just to go to the beginning of a file but there are things emacs does well.
- jhasse 8y ago
  Ctrl+Home also works (Windows and Linux).

chimprich 8y ago

A 40 year old UX is a UX that has had 40 years of refinement iteration applied to it. "Accessible" is a fine goal, everything else being equal, but for something I spend so much time in, I look for maximum potential power in my editor. Compare graphical desktops and the Unix command line.

accatyyc 8y ago
Now now, I use Emacs myself but I wouldn’t call its UX “refined”. It’s loads of stuff piled on top of eachother and many built-in packages to do the same thing (since everything had to be backwards compatible). Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this." I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.
  - accatyyc 8y ago
    Hehe, thanks for the laugh! Yeah, I can totally relate. In fact, to become effective in Emacs I had to start by reading a book (Mastering Emacs, can totally recommend if you ever decide to try again!) and then spending _a lot_ of time fighting configurations. Even now that I’m very comfortable in Emacs I occasionally spend hours to just get a package working correctly (recently it was lsp-mode, which looks like the solution to many problems with Emacs, but I could never get it to work). So yeah, I can’t really tell you it will be worth it productivity wise to learn Emacs, but for me it has gotten to the point that configuring it is a lot of fun and sort of replaces hobby programming projects for me.
    - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
      I try occasionally because I'm pretty sure that eventually I would get to a place where Emacs would be astounding. (Or Vim, lest any partisans think I haven't given it a shot.) I just so far haven't quite gotten over that hill. But someday. (Ironically, I spend most of my professional editing time -- which involves writing documentation in Markdown, not coding -- in BBEdit, because while there are a lot of coding editors that do more than it does, it has a few features for text slicing and dicing that I just haven't seen duplicated anywhere else.)

nukeop 8y ago

That might be true if you're an occasional developer but if you're putting in 8 hours a day for years you're going to want to have your tools tailored to you very closely.

antihero 8y ago
My tools are tailored to me closely. Anyway, typing the code out is such a small part of coding.

fxfan 8y ago

Just because there's one obnoxious person doesn't mean you have to unnecessarily, and in this case, wrongly, insult a great tool. I'm a vim user and obviously don't have patience for typing alt-shift+, just to go to the beginning of a file but there are things emacs does well.

jhasse 8y ago
Ctrl+Home also works (Windows and Linux).