7 ms·

There are lines in my Emacs config files that are older than some of the programmers I work with, so I can relate. Contrary to what some people think, Emacs do

by jwr 7y ago

There are lines in my Emacs config files that are older than some of the programmers I work with, so I can relate. Contrary to what some people think, Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration. I revisit my setup every couple of years or so, and I always find it is time well spent, as my productivity goes up as a result. I do not know of a better environment for multi-language programming, and I often look around and try different things to see if they match up.

e40 7y ago
I have lines in my .emacs that go back to when I used gosmacs. I constantly add to my setup, mostly for email handling, though. I have a filtering system built in CL on top of MH-E on top of nmh.
bobongo 7y ago
> Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration. Unless you are using org-mode, in which case updating org-mode may cause issues that require reading up on the breaking changes that were introduced between org-mode versions. (This is meant as a heads up for newcomers using org-mode, since it's pretty popular at this point.)
- vvillena 7y ago
  Upgrading org-mode should count as tweaking the config. Is there any part of org-mode that stopped working suddenly?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I've been using org-mode for about a decade now, and while I know there were changes made, I don't think there was even a single thing that just stopped working under me during the upgrade. I have a somewhat nontrivial amount of org setup, and there was never a case I'd have to fix anything in it after upgrade.
    - javiermares 7y ago
      Same here.
    - blue1 7y ago
      Export to HTML had some non-trivial changes in output.
- dmortin 7y ago
  Don't upgrade org mode if you don't have to. I only update org when I move to a new major emacs version and it comes with a new org bundled.
dleslie 7y ago
And it will only get better once it understands LSP, better than it does now. It's a pale copy of VSCode's incredible LSP implementation: for a user, simply clicking the button to install the extension automagically configures a fully functional language environment; even for C++. Most of the time. When last I tried to get decent C++ support working with Emacs, about a year ago, it was still a mess of compiling rtags/cquery, installing global, configuring per-project variants, sacrificing ungulats, hail baphomet.
- jdormit 7y ago
  I've been using Emacs' lsp-mode (https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode) for professional Python development for months now and it's been a great experience. It requires a little more work than I'd like to get it working with virtual environments (making sure the LSP server process is running in your venv, mainly), but I would argue that's a problem with the Python ecosystem, not lsp-mode itself. And for statically typed languages (I've tried Rust and Go) the lsp-mode experience is flawless and works out of the box.
  - jonnycomputer 7y ago
    I switched from emacs to Pycharm for python development, out of frustration with what most packaged tools was getting me, relative to what PyCharm did with no effort and little frustration at all. Too many half-maintained packages, put together, fighting incompatibilities. However, LSP really may change that.
    - theCodeStig 7y ago
      LSP will definitely change that.
  - geoka9 7y ago
    I've tried lsp for Go and found it a bit lacking at this point. For example, does lsp for Go in Emacs allow searching for the implementers of an interface? Or the interfaces that a type implements? Guru is great with things like that but the switch to modules broke it and it doesn't look like it's ever going to be updated.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"Contrary to what some people think, Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration." This is true, to an extent. I have not touched my current Emacs configuration in about 6 months now, but it took years of tweaking and probably hundreds of hours to get it to a state where Emacs was mostly the way I wanted it... though it'll never really be complete, as there are still a lot of things I'd like it to do that it doesn't yet but could, and there are always new things I could do that would be interesting or new, more efficient ways to do what I'm already doing. So, overall, it has the potential to be a great time suck, and certainly was for me when I first started. How much time it'll take for you really depends on your needs, and how much you're willing to live with the defaults that Emacs and its various modes and packages provide, and how much tweaking and customization you want to do. I needed and wanted quite a lot myself.
- m463 7y ago
  > So, overall, it has the potential to be a great time suck The most important productivity step is to launch your editor. Unfortunately if every time you launch your editor, you get distracted by the editor itself... Well, your init.el will be well maintained. :)
gumby 7y ago
> Contrary to what some people think, Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration. Hear hear. I've been using Emacs since the late 70s when my int file was a compiled TECO library that other people also used. Nowadays my init file is only a few dozen lines and when I log into some random machine (with no init file) most things simply work without surprising me. It is highly customizable but it doesn't mean it must be customized.
pjmlp 7y ago
Emacs for me was always a poor replacement for my Borland and SlickEdit developer experience. Actually during my UNIX phase, I rather used XEmacs, as it provided much more friendly tooling than Emacs. Nowadays Emacs really fails short from what Java and .NET environments offer out of the box, specially in graphical tooling. Including mixed language development with C++. It is also interesting that James Gosling nowadays prefers IDEs as any UNIX editor, as stated in several interviews.
- dragonsh 7y ago
  No it's not a poor replacement of Borland or SlickEdit used both and still went back to emacs. Personally I use emacs over vscode due to following reasons, 1. it does not waste CPU cycle in rendering html, we have browsers for it. 2. Provide a good irc insterface with ERC without distracting my work like slack and discord with unnecessary bells and whistles, 3. and last but not the least does one thing very well which is processing and rendering text and by virtue became the most customizable editor in the world (not necessary to use customization all the time as it provides a very good out of box experience as well). Emacs inspired me to take on and understand functional language. Rust still feels an incremental improvement with memory safety over C, not a radical improvement or a paradigm shift. I believe C is unfairly criticised. C has it’s own drawbacks but it is one of the language which really gave me power to tinker with hardware directly and it was refreshing. Rust may be a great language in design but didn’t generate that feeling of directly able to work with hardware as I had when I used basic peek and poke and later C. Simplicity of C is still far superior to Rust. If org-mode, text processing and lisp stays with emacs it will continue to survive for next 40 years. Yes it needs constant evolution but I do not agree with the list like renedering html, working with slack will enable it to stay relevant with modern generation Z programmers.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    It doesn't do any kind of graphical tooling. IDEs also don't waste CPU cycles displaying HTML. C is rightfully crictised, plenty of systems programming languages offer the same hardware access, without exposing the world to memory corruption and UB exploits, some of them about 10 years older than C. Unfortunately UNIX had more success than the OSes they were available on.
tmalsburg2 7y ago
I largely agree, though to be fair, I did spend quite a bit of time tweaking my config and learning elisp during the first two years. At the time I was a PhD student and could afford it, but today? not sure. It was quite an investment of time but since I spend my days mostly processing text (code and prose) it paid off spectacularly well. Side note: Emacs is massively underappreciated as a tool for writing prose. So many wonderful tools that make writing more effective and pleasant.
- harblcat 7y ago
  Curious, would you care to elaborate about the prose-writing tools? I only ever see things relating to coding in emacs.

by jwr 7y ago

e40 7y ago

I have lines in my .emacs that go back to when I used gosmacs. I constantly add to my setup, mostly for email handling, though. I have a filtering system built in CL on top of MH-E on top of nmh.

bobongo 7y ago

> Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration. Unless you are using org-mode, in which case updating org-mode may cause issues that require reading up on the breaking changes that were introduced between org-mode versions. (This is meant as a heads up for newcomers using org-mode, since it's pretty popular at this point.)

vvillena 7y ago
Upgrading org-mode should count as tweaking the config. Is there any part of org-mode that stopped working suddenly?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I've been using org-mode for about a decade now, and while I know there were changes made, I don't think there was even a single thing that just stopped working under me during the upgrade. I have a somewhat nontrivial amount of org setup, and there was never a case I'd have to fix anything in it after upgrade.
  - javiermares 7y ago
    Same here.
  - blue1 7y ago
    Export to HTML had some non-trivial changes in output.
dmortin 7y ago
Don't upgrade org mode if you don't have to. I only update org when I move to a new major emacs version and it comes with a new org bundled.

dleslie 7y ago

And it will only get better once it understands LSP, better than it does now. It's a pale copy of VSCode's incredible LSP implementation: for a user, simply clicking the button to install the extension automagically configures a fully functional language environment; even for C++. Most of the time. When last I tried to get decent C++ support working with Emacs, about a year ago, it was still a mess of compiling rtags/cquery, installing global, configuring per-project variants, sacrificing ungulats, hail baphomet.

jdormit 7y ago
I've been using Emacs' lsp-mode (https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode) for professional Python development for months now and it's been a great experience. It requires a little more work than I'd like to get it working with virtual environments (making sure the LSP server process is running in your venv, mainly), but I would argue that's a problem with the Python ecosystem, not lsp-mode itself. And for statically typed languages (I've tried Rust and Go) the lsp-mode experience is flawless and works out of the box.
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  I switched from emacs to Pycharm for python development, out of frustration with what most packaged tools was getting me, relative to what PyCharm did with no effort and little frustration at all. Too many half-maintained packages, put together, fighting incompatibilities. However, LSP really may change that.
  - theCodeStig 7y ago
    LSP will definitely change that.
- geoka9 7y ago
  I've tried lsp for Go and found it a bit lacking at this point. For example, does lsp for Go in Emacs allow searching for the implementers of an interface? Or the interfaces that a type implements? Guru is great with things like that but the switch to modules broke it and it doesn't look like it's ever going to be updated.

pmoriarty 7y ago

"Contrary to what some people think, Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration." This is true, to an extent. I have not touched my current Emacs configuration in about 6 months now, but it took years of tweaking and probably hundreds of hours to get it to a state where Emacs was mostly the way I wanted it... though it'll never really be complete, as there are still a lot of things I'd like it to do that it doesn't yet but could, and there are always new things I could do that would be interesting or new, more efficient ways to do what I'm already doing. So, overall, it has the potential to be a great time suck, and certainly was for me when I first started. How much time it'll take for you really depends on your needs, and how much you're willing to live with the defaults that Emacs and its various modes and packages provide, and how much tweaking and customization you want to do. I needed and wanted quite a lot myself.

m463 7y ago
> So, overall, it has the potential to be a great time suck The most important productivity step is to launch your editor. Unfortunately if every time you launch your editor, you get distracted by the editor itself... Well, your init.el will be well maintained. :)

gumby 7y ago

> Contrary to what some people think, Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration. Hear hear. I've been using Emacs since the late 70s when my int file was a compiled TECO library that other people also used. Nowadays my init file is only a few dozen lines and when I log into some random machine (with no init file) most things simply work without surprising me. It is highly customizable but it doesn't mean it must be customized.

pjmlp 7y ago

Emacs for me was always a poor replacement for my Borland and SlickEdit developer experience. Actually during my UNIX phase, I rather used XEmacs, as it provided much more friendly tooling than Emacs. Nowadays Emacs really fails short from what Java and .NET environments offer out of the box, specially in graphical tooling. Including mixed language development with C++. It is also interesting that James Gosling nowadays prefers IDEs as any UNIX editor, as stated in several interviews.

dragonsh 7y ago
No it's not a poor replacement of Borland or SlickEdit used both and still went back to emacs. Personally I use emacs over vscode due to following reasons, 1. it does not waste CPU cycle in rendering html, we have browsers for it. 2. Provide a good irc insterface with ERC without distracting my work like slack and discord with unnecessary bells and whistles, 3. and last but not the least does one thing very well which is processing and rendering text and by virtue became the most customizable editor in the world (not necessary to use customization all the time as it provides a very good out of box experience as well). Emacs inspired me to take on and understand functional language. Rust still feels an incremental improvement with memory safety over C, not a radical improvement or a paradigm shift. I believe C is unfairly criticised. C has it’s own drawbacks but it is one of the language which really gave me power to tinker with hardware directly and it was refreshing. Rust may be a great language in design but didn’t generate that feeling of directly able to work with hardware as I had when I used basic peek and poke and later C. Simplicity of C is still far superior to Rust. If org-mode, text processing and lisp stays with emacs it will continue to survive for next 40 years. Yes it needs constant evolution but I do not agree with the list like renedering html, working with slack will enable it to stay relevant with modern generation Z programmers.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  It doesn't do any kind of graphical tooling. IDEs also don't waste CPU cycles displaying HTML. C is rightfully crictised, plenty of systems programming languages offer the same hardware access, without exposing the world to memory corruption and UB exploits, some of them about 10 years older than C. Unfortunately UNIX had more success than the OSes they were available on.

tmalsburg2 7y ago

I largely agree, though to be fair, I did spend quite a bit of time tweaking my config and learning elisp during the first two years. At the time I was a PhD student and could afford it, but today? not sure. It was quite an investment of time but since I spend my days mostly processing text (code and prose) it paid off spectacularly well. Side note: Emacs is massively underappreciated as a tool for writing prose. So many wonderful tools that make writing more effective and pleasant.

harblcat 7y ago
Curious, would you care to elaborate about the prose-writing tools? I only ever see things relating to coding in emacs.