5 ms·

I've used emacs for maybe 18 months solid. I never found it had a single feature that my other editors didn't have (not saying it doesn't, just staying I didn't

I've used emacs for maybe 18 months solid. I never found it had a single feature that my other editors didn't have (not saying it doesn't, just staying I didn't run into them). My other editors can be extended via scripts. My other editors (mostly) have keyboard macros, repeat, etc.. My other editors can be used efficiently keyboard only. My other editors debug various languages. My other editors open shells in the editor. I don't care about org mode, I care about editing code. Conversely many other editors do their best to be dev env aware, reading/understanding/integrating various language environment project files, which was never something I found in emacs (maybe it's all been added since I my emacs times) About the only thing I still would consider using emacs for is editing in a shell remotely but (a) usually it's not already installed and (b) usually I'm not editing anything serious remotely. What's special about emacs? What am I missing that's not in other editors?

metroholografix 6y ago
Emacs is not an editor, it is rapidly-programmable-at-runtime-evolvable software that is designed to: + Help you realize how _you_ best deal with information. + Help you manifest your realization through _rapidly_ molding Emacs into your conceived model. It is also the closest thing we have today to the Lisp Machine paradigm. I wrote this earlier today: You'll get the most out of Emacs if you treat it as an investment and put in the time to learn at least some Emacs Lisp so that you can confidently explore and customize the rest of the system. You don't need to become an expert overnight, just learn enough to navigate the system (which is self-documenting and geared towards helping you perform that navigation). Yes, it may feel weird or out of touch with contemporary aesthetics but that's really because it doesn't come with strong, tunnel-like notions of _how you should think_ and _how you should work_. It is not easy today to come to terms with a tool that's simply designed to help you craft a computing experience, since we've been so conditioned to expect somebody else's model be there from the beginning: https://xristos.sdf.org/why-emacs.txt https://xristos.sdf.org/why-emacs.txt
- balloneij 6y ago
  At what point does this get in the way of your programming? If there's always more to learn about the tool, I think that would bother me. I would like to like emacs, but the couple times I tried it it gets in the way because I don't know it well enough. Vim seems more appealing because there is less to know up-front, but it is still extensible
  - _se 6y ago
    It doesn't get in the way at all. Once you understand what's going on, it is a huge productivity boost.
  - metroholografix 6y ago
    I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself, almost like a cybernetic extra sense that I can put to use as I see fit. Practically, as I go about my daily programming, if I feel something is off and could be improved, I have a pretty accurate idea of how long it'll take for me to implement it. Usually it's not that long and frequent 10-15 minute diversions of this sort happen multiple times a day. It simply means that the process works as expected, I'm approximating an ideal -temporal- mind model. A few times a month, I'll do more extensive work, focusing on a number of long-term projects or exploring various ideas I've had and put down in my notes. All this work is geared around helping me manage information more effectively. I'm an information junkie, hopelessly addicted to the Internet and that's by choice. I wouldn't give it up for nothing. Emacs is the tool that makes the difference since this continuous feedback loop of me adapting Emacs to help me deal with more and more information, allows me to keep up. Being an information consumer is easy today, you simply sit back and absorb what's being blasted at you. Being plugged into numerous signal sources and managing that information _on your own terms_ is the tricky bit and where Emacs shines while most other tools fall flat, since they're either too constrained or lack the necessary programmability.
    - asdf123wtf 6y ago
      > I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself... The problem is that these days, you could use vscode or atom for a month or two, and get that same feeling. Emacs from scratch is not a great use of time anymore.
- indymike 6y ago
  Wow, and here I was using Emacs to edit (usually) text files.
ddavis 6y ago
I think it really comes down to having the patience to learn how to extend your personal Emacs setup with the built in programming language: Emacs Lisp. From personal experience I can say that learning the basics of Emacs Lisp turned my relationship with Emacs from "preferred" to "nothing else measures up"
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  Ever other editor has a programming language for modifying it. What makes emacs special? couldn't you script all those other editors to do the same things? I'd certainly feel my editor was amazing if I scripting 50 custom features but I wouldn't consider my editor better if I can script those same 50 features in any editor. I'd just consider the cost of switching high and not confuse that with whether one editor is better than another.
joan_kode 6y ago
One of Emacs' strongest points is its ability to nicely integrate things other than "just editing code" into your workflow. As the half-joke goes, it already has a mode for everything. So in that sense, your question kind of comes off as "I only care about basic features that every editor has. What am I missing?" With that said, even if we ignore Magit and Org, and just look at dumb code/text editing, Emacs has some pretty rare niceties. I've gotten used to undo-tree, and now I find it sorely lacking in literally any software that can "undo". The interactive insertion and inspection of unicode characters is also nifty.
- smt88 6y ago
  > I've gotten used to undo-tree, and now I find it sorely lacking in literally any software that can "undo". This feature is built in to all JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, etc.), most popular web wikis (Confluence, Notion, etc.), Google's web Office suite, and Microsoft's web office suite. It's available as a plugin for VS Code. It's also built in to MacOS (Time Machine), Windows (File History), Dropbox, SpiderOak, and Sync, though some of those require it to be enabled and it doesn't work with keyboard shortcuts. > The interactive insertion and inspection of unicode characters is also nifty. When does this come in handy?
wglb 6y ago
Have you used magit? How about slime? Org mode? Other editors don’t have those
- smt88 6y ago
  > magit Lots of editors have git plugins. The question is, what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? > slime This is a pretty niche need, but sure. I would agree that people writing most Lisps (excluding Clojure) are better off using something like Emacs. > Org mode The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me reminders, and can be shared with coworkers when necessary. I've recently been using ClickUp, and it's been fantastic. I can run it in a window next to my editor. I'm not sure what the setup is missing that Org mode doesn't deliver, but I do know that Org mode is missing a lot that ClickUp gives me.
  - sparkie 6y ago
    > The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me reminders, and can be shared with coworkers when necessary. Check out Orgzly from F-droid repos.
    - smt88 6y ago
      OK, I checked it out. I'm still not seeing reminders integrated with the notifications on my phone, nor am I seeing anything that the people on my marketing team would touch with a 10-ft pole. There are lots of tools I'd use if I weren't programming for work and didn't have a team of mixed technical skills, and perhaps Emacs fits into that category.
  - vvillena 6y ago
    > what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? It's not the "what", it's the "how". Magit enables extremely fancy workflows with great simplicity, and its UI is self-discoverable and well laid-out. Magit has the best UX of any git tool.
subsection1h 6y ago
"I don't care about org mode" Thanks for specifying this and confirming my observations. My experience has been that Emacs users are much more likely than users of other text editors to be researchers and other avid note-takers who do care about tools like Org mode. For example, I have a personal knowledge base that includes several thousand Org files containing my notes. It's not a coincidence that the creator of Org mode is an astronomy professor[1]; whereas, the majority of the most popular VS Code extensions[2] that aren't from Microsoft seem to have been created by web developers whose portfolios include no research or non-web code repos. My point isn't to disparage the users of VS Code, but to point out that a tool like Org mode is unlikely to be developed for editors like VS Code or appreciated by the users of such editors. When TextMate was the flavor of the month editor that its users (web developers?) claimed was the best editor ever, I waited for an "Org mode for TextMate". It never happened. Afterwards, when Sublime Text was the flavor of the month that its users (web developers?) claimed was the best editor ever, I waited for an "Org mode for Sublime Text". It never happened. Now that VS Code is the flavor of month, I'm waiting for an "Org mode for VS Code". But all I've seen is an unmaintained extension[3] that provides roughly 1-2% of the features of Org mode[4]. [1] https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/c.dominik/ https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/c.dominik/ [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&category=All%20categories&sortBy=Installs https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&ca... [3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone.org-mode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone.... [4] https://orgmode.org/org.html https://orgmode.org/org.html
- fluffything 6y ago
  I'm a researcher, and I have a git repository for my notes, which I edit using markdown. It supports latex math, tables, cross links, labels, and html if I need to do anything fancy, like inserting images, videos, etc. (youtube embedded video? no problem). I can edit them from any device, and they get sync'ed everywhere via git. I can also read them from everywhere, and markdown renders super nicely. I take markdown over org-mode everyday. I used to use org-mode 15 years ago, but today that's pointless for me.
  - panzerklein 6y ago
olau 6y ago
Emacs will always be there for you. Personally, I can't move because of the rich set of text editing commands. Some of it seems silly, like word transposition, or jumping over sexps. But with Emacs, it feels like it's just an extension of my mind, most of the time. I had the same feeling some time after I learned touch typing.

metroholografix 6y ago

Emacs is not an editor, it is rapidly-programmable-at-runtime-evolvable software that is designed to: + Help you realize how _you_ best deal with information. + Help you manifest your realization through _rapidly_ molding Emacs into your conceived model. It is also the closest thing we have today to the Lisp Machine paradigm. I wrote this earlier today: You'll get the most out of Emacs if you treat it as an investment and put in the time to learn at least some Emacs Lisp so that you can confidently explore and customize the rest of the system. You don't need to become an expert overnight, just learn enough to navigate the system (which is self-documenting and geared towards helping you perform that navigation). Yes, it may feel weird or out of touch with contemporary aesthetics but that's really because it doesn't come with strong, tunnel-like notions of _how you should think_ and _how you should work_. It is not easy today to come to terms with a tool that's simply designed to help you craft a computing experience, since we've been so conditioned to expect somebody else's model be there from the beginning: https://xristos.sdf.org/why-emacs.txt https://xristos.sdf.org/why-emacs.txt

balloneij 6y ago
At what point does this get in the way of your programming? If there's always more to learn about the tool, I think that would bother me. I would like to like emacs, but the couple times I tried it it gets in the way because I don't know it well enough. Vim seems more appealing because there is less to know up-front, but it is still extensible
- _se 6y ago
  It doesn't get in the way at all. Once you understand what's going on, it is a huge productivity boost.
- metroholografix 6y ago
  I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself, almost like a cybernetic extra sense that I can put to use as I see fit. Practically, as I go about my daily programming, if I feel something is off and could be improved, I have a pretty accurate idea of how long it'll take for me to implement it. Usually it's not that long and frequent 10-15 minute diversions of this sort happen multiple times a day. It simply means that the process works as expected, I'm approximating an ideal -temporal- mind model. A few times a month, I'll do more extensive work, focusing on a number of long-term projects or exploring various ideas I've had and put down in my notes. All this work is geared around helping me manage information more effectively. I'm an information junkie, hopelessly addicted to the Internet and that's by choice. I wouldn't give it up for nothing. Emacs is the tool that makes the difference since this continuous feedback loop of me adapting Emacs to help me deal with more and more information, allows me to keep up. Being an information consumer is easy today, you simply sit back and absorb what's being blasted at you. Being plugged into numerous signal sources and managing that information _on your own terms_ is the tricky bit and where Emacs shines while most other tools fall flat, since they're either too constrained or lack the necessary programmability.
  - asdf123wtf 6y ago
    > I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself... The problem is that these days, you could use vscode or atom for a month or two, and get that same feeling. Emacs from scratch is not a great use of time anymore.
indymike 6y ago
Wow, and here I was using Emacs to edit (usually) text files.

ddavis 6y ago

I think it really comes down to having the patience to learn how to extend your personal Emacs setup with the built in programming language: Emacs Lisp. From personal experience I can say that learning the basics of Emacs Lisp turned my relationship with Emacs from "preferred" to "nothing else measures up"

gfxgirl 6y ago
Ever other editor has a programming language for modifying it. What makes emacs special? couldn't you script all those other editors to do the same things? I'd certainly feel my editor was amazing if I scripting 50 custom features but I wouldn't consider my editor better if I can script those same 50 features in any editor. I'd just consider the cost of switching high and not confuse that with whether one editor is better than another.

joan_kode 6y ago

One of Emacs' strongest points is its ability to nicely integrate things other than "just editing code" into your workflow. As the half-joke goes, it already has a mode for everything. So in that sense, your question kind of comes off as "I only care about basic features that every editor has. What am I missing?" With that said, even if we ignore Magit and Org, and just look at dumb code/text editing, Emacs has some pretty rare niceties. I've gotten used to undo-tree, and now I find it sorely lacking in literally any software that can "undo". The interactive insertion and inspection of unicode characters is also nifty.

smt88 6y ago
> I've gotten used to undo-tree, and now I find it sorely lacking in literally any software that can "undo". This feature is built in to all JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, etc.), most popular web wikis (Confluence, Notion, etc.), Google's web Office suite, and Microsoft's web office suite. It's available as a plugin for VS Code. It's also built in to MacOS (Time Machine), Windows (File History), Dropbox, SpiderOak, and Sync, though some of those require it to be enabled and it doesn't work with keyboard shortcuts. > The interactive insertion and inspection of unicode characters is also nifty. When does this come in handy?

wglb 6y ago

Have you used magit? How about slime? Org mode? Other editors don’t have those

smt88 6y ago
> magit Lots of editors have git plugins. The question is, what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? > slime This is a pretty niche need, but sure. I would agree that people writing most Lisps (excluding Clojure) are better off using something like Emacs. > Org mode The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me reminders, and can be shared with coworkers when necessary. I've recently been using ClickUp, and it's been fantastic. I can run it in a window next to my editor. I'm not sure what the setup is missing that Org mode doesn't deliver, but I do know that Org mode is missing a lot that ClickUp gives me.
- sparkie 6y ago
  > The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me reminders, and can be shared with coworkers when necessary. Check out Orgzly from F-droid repos.
  - smt88 6y ago
    OK, I checked it out. I'm still not seeing reminders integrated with the notifications on my phone, nor am I seeing anything that the people on my marketing team would touch with a 10-ft pole. There are lots of tools I'd use if I weren't programming for work and didn't have a team of mixed technical skills, and perhaps Emacs fits into that category.
- vvillena 6y ago
  > what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? It's not the "what", it's the "how". Magit enables extremely fancy workflows with great simplicity, and its UI is self-discoverable and well laid-out. Magit has the best UX of any git tool.

subsection1h 6y ago

"I don't care about org mode" Thanks for specifying this and confirming my observations. My experience has been that Emacs users are much more likely than users of other text editors to be researchers and other avid note-takers who do care about tools like Org mode. For example, I have a personal knowledge base that includes several thousand Org files containing my notes. It's not a coincidence that the creator of Org mode is an astronomy professor[1]; whereas, the majority of the most popular VS Code extensions[2] that aren't from Microsoft seem to have been created by web developers whose portfolios include no research or non-web code repos. My point isn't to disparage the users of VS Code, but to point out that a tool like Org mode is unlikely to be developed for editors like VS Code or appreciated by the users of such editors. When TextMate was the flavor of the month editor that its users (web developers?) claimed was the best editor ever, I waited for an "Org mode for TextMate". It never happened. Afterwards, when Sublime Text was the flavor of the month that its users (web developers?) claimed was the best editor ever, I waited for an "Org mode for Sublime Text". It never happened. Now that VS Code is the flavor of month, I'm waiting for an "Org mode for VS Code". But all I've seen is an unmaintained extension[3] that provides roughly 1-2% of the features of Org mode[4]. [1] https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/c.dominik/ https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/c.dominik/ [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&category=All%20categories&sortBy=Installs https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&ca... [3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone.org-mode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone.... [4] https://orgmode.org/org.html https://orgmode.org/org.html

fluffything 6y ago
I'm a researcher, and I have a git repository for my notes, which I edit using markdown. It supports latex math, tables, cross links, labels, and html if I need to do anything fancy, like inserting images, videos, etc. (youtube embedded video? no problem). I can edit them from any device, and they get sync'ed everywhere via git. I can also read them from everywhere, and markdown renders super nicely. I take markdown over org-mode everyday. I used to use org-mode 15 years ago, but today that's pointless for me.
- panzerklein 6y ago

olau 6y ago

Emacs will always be there for you. Personally, I can't move because of the rich set of text editing commands. Some of it seems silly, like word transposition, or jumping over sexps. But with Emacs, it feels like it's just an extension of my mind, most of the time. I had the same feeling some time after I learned touch typing.