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As a long time Emacs user I was recently shocked to see that everything that needs to be painfully configured in Emacs comes from free with VS Code (I don't fee
by tangue 7y ago
As a long time Emacs user I was recently shocked to see that everything that needs to be painfully configured in Emacs comes from free with VS Code (I don't feel the need for an IDE for the code I'm producing). But the value of Emacs is that everything you learned is solid and probably won't change. Most of the information in the old O'reilly Emacs "Learning Gnu Emacs" from 1992 is still valid. That's deeply reassuring in world of fucked-up js frameworks and endless new useless features. I'm happy to have a stable editor. Apart from technical aspects it's important for me and for some people I guess that my editor is free. "Free as in speech", not open-sourced as a marketing strategy by corporate monsters.
- nextos 7y agoEmacs is not an IDE. It's more a text-mode Lisp machine with lots of little libraries to build your own IDEs and other text-mode applications. So comparing a big IDE like Visual Studio vs Emacs is like comparing a big framework like Rails vs lots of little Clojure libraries. The latter is always more complex to learn and setup, but it is also more able to adapt and evolve. It's a different design compromise. I think Emacs is really worthwhile to learn, and it's become much easier recently. Things like ELPA and use-package streamline configurations a lot. The Language Server Protocol (LSP) will make things even better.
- m463 7y agoThat said, emacs was the IDE for sunos/solaris years ago. You could compile from within it, run your code within it and step through the source code line by line.