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I don't use emacs. I use text files to organise myself but I use notepad++ to edit them. I have tried to learn emacs a couple of times but I am really unmotiv

I don't use emacs. I use text files to organise myself but I use notepad++ to edit them. I have tried to learn emacs a couple of times but I am really unmotivated - don't see any case where it would help me. I am afraid I'm missing something.

brandonmenc 6y ago
Longtime (two-decade-ish) previous emacs user. I lived in it. I used it for literally everything - web browsing, mail, mp3 playing, etc. > I am afraid I'm missing something. You are not. Nowadays I just use crappy little text editors for small notes and JetBrains IDEs for dev work.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I needed to hear that; articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me. It wouldn't be the first task tracking application I'd be trying. Right now I use intellij for my main development work; I use some keyboard combinations where applicable (and changed the keymap to Sublime Text because I've used it and its derivatives (vs code mainly) for the better part of my career. I don't have a dedicated flow for task tracking. Right now for work we use Phabricator, it's a bit awkward because it's a heap of independent modules built on top of each other, but it met our requirements (free, open source, self-hosted, not shit). For a while I used a todo.txt addon in Sublime Text, which worked great; haven't been able to find a good alternative to it. Used Wunderlist for a while, but I couldn't find my finished tasks without paying and it's been discontinued. Same with Todoist, minus the discontinued-ness. Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me; I'm pretty good at typing if I do say so myself (~120wpm according to online tests / typeracer and co), but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim. I also didn't grow up with *nix systems, commandline only became a thing once I started my education and career ~15 years ago.
  - codygman 6y ago
    > > I am afraid I'm missing something. > You are not You are missing an entire world treated as text and a consistent and an endlessly configurable interface for everything you can pull into your emacs Borg. See this comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 Note, many still use emacs for what the GP described and more.
    - brandonmenc 6y ago
      Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv.
      - codygman 6y ago
        > Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Yeah? I'm not sure how meaningful this argument is here since you can just get by with nano and a terminal. > Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. I frequent the places that the "cultists" would most likely be and the prevailing theme is "if your workflow works, keep it, but emacs could do X for you". > There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. Yeah, but that doesn't mean Emacs wouldn't make them less or more productive. I don't think I've seen the "you need emacs" strawman your arguing against in practice. > And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Would those people be more or less productive without emacs? I find answering questions like this for myself difficult, I can't imagine trying to decide others would be better off not using an editor. Isn't saying lots of people exist that would be more productive without the kind of presumption that annoyed you from the Emacs cult? > Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv. Right, which is why I commented what the other user was missing and not "you need this".
  - brandonmenc 6y ago
    > articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me Lisp is great and you should learn it. (If you want.) You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect. This approach is also way more fun. If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp. > Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me Honestly, me neither. At least, not the way they were when I used emacs as my "daily driver." Why? Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise and fast that "using the mouse" is no longer an impediment. If you ever try to use a pre-2000 mouse and operating system with their horrible (compared to now) tracking and accuracy, the claim that mice slowed a developer down makes total sense. Nowadays? Not so much. [0] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/assets/interpreter/scheme.html https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/assets/interprete... [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
    - clojureyoureyes 6y ago
      > Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise But you to have to know where to click. And that's the biggest problem with so-called "modern" UIs - it lacks discoverability. Either you memorize all menus and dialogs, or you have to seek out the functionality you need each time you can't remember anything. And sometimes these dialogs change, so you have to rediscover everything once again. In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys. > You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect. One of the main reasons I moved to Emacs (11 years ago) was Common Lisp and SLIME. > If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp. A real(world) Lisp is Clojure these days
      - brandonmenc 6y ago
        > In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys. afaik every modern IDE has this discoverability functionality. I use shift-shift and control-control autocomplete command menus all the time in JetBrains.
  - clojureyoureyes 6y ago
    > but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim. In Emacs - you don't have, there are a lot of packages which make the discoverability a breeze - counsel-M-x, helm-M-x for exploring all commands with corresponding shortcuts and also which-key, which allows you to automatically pop up the "next steps" in your current state. How about having a mental capacity to remember all menus/dialog boxes in your IDE?
tgbugs 6y ago
An anecdote on what you might be missing. There is nothing concrete that not using org-mode would cause you to miss out on, it is rather the possibility of being able to access one of countless workflows that have been built on top of it. When I started to use org-mode it was because I needed to generate a gant chart and I wanted a text format. I haven't used that functionality every again. Since then I have used org-mode for a variety of things, but never all at once, always a little piece at a time. Typeset a thesis in latex? Execute analysis code in a reproducible way? Write DRY bash scripts and tangle (compile) them? Run and log the output of one-off commands on remote servers so that if you ever have to do it again you have a record of it? The list goes on and on. Last week I was told that I needed to start keeping track of the time I spend working on different tasks. Despite keeping todo lists I have never used the org clocking functions, ye there they were there, just a C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o away. Integrated into my workflow when I needed it with all of 30 seconds of effort and two key combinations of overhead. Emacs is useful because countless others have encountered problems the likes of which a single person only rarely dreams. Not only that but they have probably already implemented a solution that is fairly easy to find once you encounter the problem and in 80% of the cases can be used unmodified. Yes, you and all the rest of us are missing something. It is impossible NOT to miss something and no tool can solve that for you. The question to me is whether you want to spend your time learning a tool and integrating with an ecosystem where you never have the possibility of benefiting from the things that others did not miss.
bananamerica 6y ago
Emacs is great, but use whatever you want. Of course you’ll be missing on something but that’s true for a lot of things.
- taeric 6y ago
  Worth underscoring that you are always missing something. You don't dodge that bullet by using emacs, just pick what you want to miss.
  - bitdeveloper 6y ago
    For example, if you do choose to use emacs, then you are missing out on time you could have spent learning vim.
    - philosopher1234 6y ago
      Nothing like a bit of vim vs emacs. Though I do get sick of vim winning every time ;)
      - bananamerica 6y ago
        Vim and Emacs are not in the same category. Direct comparisons are silly and useless, like comparing Pycharm and Notepad++.
        craig131 6y ago
        Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        bananamerica 6y ago
        This says nothing about the matter at hand. The concept of category is useful, regardless of its impreciseness. And some categorizations are better than others. > Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them. That’s also patently false: many things belong to the same category. Everything that exists belongs to the existent category, for example.
umvi 6y ago
I think the appeal is hack-ability. You can easily write a little Lisp program that hooks into emacs which you can trigger any number of ways.
na85 6y ago
I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildly divorced from the real world because of his personal choices that he really has no idea what makes a compelling UX vs what makes a complete mess of arcane incantations. On top of that, the documentation is only suitable as a reference for someone who already knows emacs, so it's hard to learn. To wit: Again I really really like Emacs as a piece of software, and I've been using it for like 10 years now. Maybe 3 or 4 of those years I've been using it reasonably seriously and even I find my eyes glaze over because of how dense and unapproachable the documentation is. On top of that, being a political project, Stallman actively resists certain improvements to Emacs that would for example make it work better on my Mac, because my Mac is nonfree and Stallman would rather have an objectively poorer piece of software than one that "encourages" using MacOS. And of course the other senior people in the Emacs project don't want to go against Stallman, so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name. If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Alas I don't have the skill nor the time to attempt such a thing. Edit: hey how about a substantive reply rather than drive-by downvotes?
- omaranto 6y ago
  > If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults. There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)
- 6y ago
antoineMoPa 6y ago
Just sit down and follow the tutorial that you can click in the emacs homescreen. It is not that easy, but the effort you invest in learning emacs will pay off eventually.
Koshkin 6y ago
Emacs is just a different universe. You either learn to live in it or you don’t. That’s all there is to it.
totetsu 6y ago
I only really use emacs for Org mode and Org mode extensions. It wasn't too hard to learn just enough emacs for that. The motivation comes from how fast and convenient org mode is as a journal and a static site generator, compared to other tools, and having all my documents in plain text for future proofing.
- billwear 6y ago
  yes, exactly. i don't even pretend to know a shard of what's available in emacs. i think of it like being able to afford a full-size, professional mechanic's toolbox: you won't have a clue what half of those tools do, but if you run into some weird problem, you can figure out the tool and solve the problem without buying something else.
thom 6y ago
Emacs is an enormous investment but every time I'm forced to use another editor or IDE I'm reminded how much it pays off. Fundamentally, all Emacs does is treat the whole world as text. Everything from that point forward is about giving you (or allowing you to build) tools to manipulate text in a way that is natural and powerful for you. This doesn't sound particularly earth-shaking, but it really is. Think of a language like Ruby or especially Clojure, where there are a few core data structures, but many things that leverage them. This means that every time you learn part of the Ruby Array API, or a useful function to work on Clojure sequences, you get to use that _everywhere_. So all of Emacs' basic interactions (and they may seem weird to begin with but they're honestly just trying to save your wrists some pain) work everywhere. You can always trust your intuitive, spatial model of the thing you're looking at. Search backwards in a text file, find some text, select it, copy it, go back to the end and paste it. That works exactly the same in a shell. It works exactly the same in a database client. Or SSH'd into a server. Or replying to an email. Same gestures when entering commands, same gestures moving around in autocomplete popups. Everything you learn with Emacs (and later, everything you write with elisp), has a little incremental benefit to your power and productivity manipulating text. Except everything is text, and so it all multiplies together. For whatever reason, I've been trying VSCode on Windows the last couple of weeks, coming from an Emacs on Linux background. I cannot tell you how painful I find it, even after making a pretty good attempt to map all the keys correctly (snarky sidebar, sorry: every editor and IDE has really good Vim key bindings, but terrible Emacs support. I used to feel bad about this until I realised it was a sign that Vim people clearly didn't use Vim that much, whereas Emacs people never leave Emacs). But VSCode begins at a completely different level of abstraction to Emacs. It doesn't want to show you a text-based UI everywhere, and implement tools to manipulate text. It wants to show you windows and panels and configuration screens and extensions with their own behaviour. Everything is modal and different, some windows are special, and you can't just navigate around the same way everywhere. So, sure, this isn't for everyone, but it's what I love about Emacs, to the point that the many regular indignities it forces on you (hangs if you're not careful about large files, abysmal performance of various things on Windows because of the overhead of starting processes, and sure, the learning curve for some people) are bearable because everything is so natural.
- kamaal 6y ago
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I have been using zim wiki. Its essentially just a basic text editor but it has a tree view for your files and supports basic syntax including check lists. I have found this suits basically all of my needs.
naveen99 6y ago
Checkout the emacs wiki: https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ See if you find any features or extensions that aren’t available on notepad++... My .emacs configuration is based on vim style modal shortcuts that make me faster than a mutant: https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.el https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.... I also use org-mode as a minor mode for autohotkey code editing, by changing the outline character from * to ; ... https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode
bitwize 6y ago
Don't worry about it too much. If your workflow works for you, go nuts with it. But should you one day find yourself needing an informational omnitool that can be adapted to the task at hand while you work with it, you will find that there is simply no substitute for Emacs. And that's the difference between an extensible text editor and Emacs. A few lines of Emacs Lisp and some Unix plumbing can get you very far -- and you can debug it in production, dynamically updating the Lisp code as you use it.
machinesbuddy 6y ago
You are right if you are comfortable with your editor you're not missing a lot. I tried Emacs for a while it's nice and comfortable the moment your brain get used to the keyboard shortkeys though since it's a different word you start running everything in Emacs and it becomes your OS. Why it can be a problem is another story. Anyway I switched back to use different tools for different jobs. For taking notes and managing them I use Joplin it supports markdown, todo lists, etc. and you can even copy paste images into the editor. Lots of other features as well as sync with different backends.
- clojureyoureyes 6y ago
  Emacs is not about shortcuts, you can use default, CUA, viper, Evil, or even custom ones. The main things are lisp and interactive commands.
iLemming 6y ago
I have used many popular and some esoteric editors and IDEs (some of them today would be considered forgotten). The last one was IntelliJ that I used very extensively. To the point of finding some undocumented features. I have participated in many conversations regarding plugins. I have almost started building my own. I was pleased with it. JetBrains does make an incredibly powerful IDEs. After almost seven years of using IntelliJ, I switched to Emacs. Emacs taught me something about myself that no other editor/IDE done before. It helped me to discover my hidden predilection. I realized that I am a tinkerer. You may say: "Aren't we all? We make software because we are tinkerers..." But there are two kinds of developers: non-conformist tinkerers and consumer-tinkerers. People who end up using Emacs are those who would choose Gentoo or Arch, first of all, because "fuck Windows" and "Ubuntu is lame", and then because they can do some crazy stuff like hijacking display brightness beyond default limits (because one time they had to stare at it, sitting on a beach). Sometimes they hook up their garage doors to a DB, so they can collect data and analyze it later. Or they build their own mechanical keyboards. Etc. Emacs taught me to abhor repetition and mundane tasks. It taught me that anything can be automated. Even Hell and Chaos can be automated. In that case, you simply end up having an automated hell and chaos. There are so many tiny examples, like whenever I'm writing something let's say in Python, and I would like to search for a code snippet on GitHub, I would simply select a piece of code in my editor and search for it - Emacs would navigate to GitHub, pass the string and even set the language to Python. Or whenever I need to create a new branch, I don't need to think about the name, I can use the ticket number and Emacs would request the issue tracker and create a branch name based on ticket's title. Or I can create a Gist (public or private) by pressing a couple of keys. And many, many more. I can watch anyone using their favorite IDE and whenever they do something so trivial, something they've been doing for a long time, and very often I'd think - "Oh, I know, more efficient way of doing the same thing" or "Ah, I've been doing it the same way for years, maybe it's time to improve it. I just realized that this is not efficient enough." But it's not just about efficiency - when you add a tiny bit of automation to your task, it becomes so much less frustrating. Of course, it is possible to have the same mindset and never get into Emacs. However, Emacs offers hundreds of tiny pieces to satisfy your needs. People say: "Emacs takes a long time to learn", but in reality - it would take you longer to become a true power-tinkerer using any other ecosystem of tools. But it is also totally okay not to be a power-tinkerer. I know many developers who don't use any fancy ways of doing things, but they are still quite impressively, very productive.

brandonmenc 6y ago

Longtime (two-decade-ish) previous emacs user. I lived in it. I used it for literally everything - web browsing, mail, mp3 playing, etc. > I am afraid I'm missing something. You are not. Nowadays I just use crappy little text editors for small notes and JetBrains IDEs for dev work.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I needed to hear that; articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me. It wouldn't be the first task tracking application I'd be trying. Right now I use intellij for my main development work; I use some keyboard combinations where applicable (and changed the keymap to Sublime Text because I've used it and its derivatives (vs code mainly) for the better part of my career. I don't have a dedicated flow for task tracking. Right now for work we use Phabricator, it's a bit awkward because it's a heap of independent modules built on top of each other, but it met our requirements (free, open source, self-hosted, not shit). For a while I used a todo.txt addon in Sublime Text, which worked great; haven't been able to find a good alternative to it. Used Wunderlist for a while, but I couldn't find my finished tasks without paying and it's been discontinued. Same with Todoist, minus the discontinued-ness. Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me; I'm pretty good at typing if I do say so myself (~120wpm according to online tests / typeracer and co), but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim. I also didn't grow up with *nix systems, commandline only became a thing once I started my education and career ~15 years ago.
- codygman 6y ago
  > > I am afraid I'm missing something. > You are not You are missing an entire world treated as text and a consistent and an endlessly configurable interface for everything you can pull into your emacs Borg. See this comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23673299 Note, many still use emacs for what the GP described and more.
  - brandonmenc 6y ago
    Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv.
    - codygman 6y ago
      > Yes, but you don't like, need that to be, I dunno, a complete programmer or person. Yeah? I'm not sure how meaningful this argument is here since you can just get by with nano and a terminal. > Which is how the "cult" (tongue-in-cheek) treats it, and why this person has FOMO. I frequent the places that the "cultists" would most likely be and the prevailing theme is "if your workflow works, keep it, but emacs could do X for you". > There are tons of examples of programming wizards and productivity gurus who don't use emacs. Yeah, but that doesn't mean Emacs wouldn't make them less or more productive. I don't think I've seen the "you need emacs" strawman your arguing against in practice. > And you'll encounter lots of people who can't get shit done but who fiddle endlessly with emacs or vi or whatever configs and believe they have some super efficient direct connection from their brain to their computer. Would those people be more or less productive without emacs? I find answering questions like this for myself difficult, I can't imagine trying to decide others would be better off not using an editor. Isn't saying lots of people exist that would be more productive without the kind of presumption that annoyed you from the Emacs cult? > Some of the best, most productive programmers I know use notepad, and some of the worst use emacs. ymmv. Right, which is why I commented what the other user was missing and not "you need this".
- brandonmenc 6y ago
  > articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me Lisp is great and you should learn it. (If you want.) You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect. This approach is also way more fun. If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp. > Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me Honestly, me neither. At least, not the way they were when I used emacs as my "daily driver." Why? Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise and fast that "using the mouse" is no longer an impediment. If you ever try to use a pre-2000 mouse and operating system with their horrible (compared to now) tracking and accuracy, the claim that mice slowed a developer down makes total sense. Nowadays? Not so much. [0] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/assets/interpreter/scheme.html https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/assets/interprete... [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
  - clojureyoureyes 6y ago
    > Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise But you to have to know where to click. And that's the biggest problem with so-called "modern" UIs - it lacks discoverability. Either you memorize all menus and dialogs, or you have to seek out the functionality you need each time you can't remember anything. And sometimes these dialogs change, so you have to rediscover everything once again. In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys. > You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect. One of the main reasons I moved to Emacs (11 years ago) was Common Lisp and SLIME. > If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp. A real(world) Lisp is Clojure these days
    - brandonmenc 6y ago
      > In Emacs, it's enough only to remember basic movement shortcuts. The rest of commands could be discovered easily with M-x and which-keys. afaik every modern IDE has this discoverability functionality. I use shift-shift and control-control autocomplete command menus all the time in JetBrains.
- clojureyoureyes 6y ago
  > but I haven't developed the mental capacity to remember all the keyboard shortcuts for emacs or vim. In Emacs - you don't have, there are a lot of packages which make the discoverability a breeze - counsel-M-x, helm-M-x for exploring all commands with corresponding shortcuts and also which-key, which allows you to automatically pop up the "next steps" in your current state. How about having a mental capacity to remember all menus/dialog boxes in your IDE?

tgbugs 6y ago

An anecdote on what you might be missing. There is nothing concrete that not using org-mode would cause you to miss out on, it is rather the possibility of being able to access one of countless workflows that have been built on top of it. When I started to use org-mode it was because I needed to generate a gant chart and I wanted a text format. I haven't used that functionality every again. Since then I have used org-mode for a variety of things, but never all at once, always a little piece at a time. Typeset a thesis in latex? Execute analysis code in a reproducible way? Write DRY bash scripts and tangle (compile) them? Run and log the output of one-off commands on remote servers so that if you ever have to do it again you have a record of it? The list goes on and on. Last week I was told that I needed to start keeping track of the time I spend working on different tasks. Despite keeping todo lists I have never used the org clocking functions, ye there they were there, just a C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o away. Integrated into my workflow when I needed it with all of 30 seconds of effort and two key combinations of overhead. Emacs is useful because countless others have encountered problems the likes of which a single person only rarely dreams. Not only that but they have probably already implemented a solution that is fairly easy to find once you encounter the problem and in 80% of the cases can be used unmodified. Yes, you and all the rest of us are missing something. It is impossible NOT to miss something and no tool can solve that for you. The question to me is whether you want to spend your time learning a tool and integrating with an ecosystem where you never have the possibility of benefiting from the things that others did not miss.

bananamerica 6y ago

Emacs is great, but use whatever you want. Of course you’ll be missing on something but that’s true for a lot of things.

taeric 6y ago
Worth underscoring that you are always missing something. You don't dodge that bullet by using emacs, just pick what you want to miss.
- bitdeveloper 6y ago
  For example, if you do choose to use emacs, then you are missing out on time you could have spent learning vim.
  - philosopher1234 6y ago
    Nothing like a bit of vim vs emacs. Though I do get sick of vim winning every time ;)
    - bananamerica 6y ago
      Vim and Emacs are not in the same category. Direct comparisons are silly and useless, like comparing Pycharm and Notepad++.
      - craig131 6y ago
        Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        bananamerica 6y ago
        This says nothing about the matter at hand. The concept of category is useful, regardless of its impreciseness. And some categorizations are better than others. > Nothing’s in the same category when you look deep enough into them. That’s also patently false: many things belong to the same category. Everything that exists belongs to the existent category, for example.

umvi 6y ago

I think the appeal is hack-ability. You can easily write a little Lisp program that hooks into emacs which you can trigger any number of ways.

na85 6y ago

I say this as an avid emacs user: Emacs has a real problem in that it's very powerful but the, let's say, spiritual leader of the project (Stallman) is so wildly divorced from the real world because of his personal choices that he really has no idea what makes a compelling UX vs what makes a complete mess of arcane incantations. On top of that, the documentation is only suitable as a reference for someone who already knows emacs, so it's hard to learn. To wit: Again I really really like Emacs as a piece of software, and I've been using it for like 10 years now. Maybe 3 or 4 of those years I've been using it reasonably seriously and even I find my eyes glaze over because of how dense and unapproachable the documentation is. On top of that, being a political project, Stallman actively resists certain improvements to Emacs that would for example make it work better on my Mac, because my Mac is nonfree and Stallman would rather have an objectively poorer piece of software than one that "encourages" using MacOS. And of course the other senior people in the Emacs project don't want to go against Stallman, so emacs is doomed to being a mediocre niche text editor with unrealized potential to become a household name. If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Alas I don't have the skill nor the time to attempt such a thing. Edit: hey how about a substantive reply rather than drive-by downvotes?

omaranto 6y ago
> If someone wrote an open source clone of Emacs that adopted some sane defaults, modern UI conventions, and dropped all the political BS it could be so much better. Emacs does have sane defaults. Did you mean instead you want defaults that remind you of the defaults in other (younger) programs that people might be more familiar with? That can be useful to gain more users. But it doesn't require an Emacs "clone", just an Emacs package with the settings you want. This approach is actually pretty popular: many people use CUA mode, Evil or even a distribution like Doom or Spacemacs. There's no need to change Emacs just to change a few defaults. There are also package that address the "modern UI conventions" part of your complaint too to some extent, and again, distributions like Doom and Spacemacs include some of these packages. (Personally I only care if UI is practical and efficient, not if it is modern, but I do understand that some people like modern UIs for their own sake.)
6y ago

antoineMoPa 6y ago

Just sit down and follow the tutorial that you can click in the emacs homescreen. It is not that easy, but the effort you invest in learning emacs will pay off eventually.

Koshkin 6y ago

Emacs is just a different universe. You either learn to live in it or you don’t. That’s all there is to it.

totetsu 6y ago

I only really use emacs for Org mode and Org mode extensions. It wasn't too hard to learn just enough emacs for that. The motivation comes from how fast and convenient org mode is as a journal and a static site generator, compared to other tools, and having all my documents in plain text for future proofing.

billwear 6y ago
yes, exactly. i don't even pretend to know a shard of what's available in emacs. i think of it like being able to afford a full-size, professional mechanic's toolbox: you won't have a clue what half of those tools do, but if you run into some weird problem, you can figure out the tool and solve the problem without buying something else.

thom 6y ago

Emacs is an enormous investment but every time I'm forced to use another editor or IDE I'm reminded how much it pays off. Fundamentally, all Emacs does is treat the whole world as text. Everything from that point forward is about giving you (or allowing you to build) tools to manipulate text in a way that is natural and powerful for you. This doesn't sound particularly earth-shaking, but it really is. Think of a language like Ruby or especially Clojure, where there are a few core data structures, but many things that leverage them. This means that every time you learn part of the Ruby Array API, or a useful function to work on Clojure sequences, you get to use that _everywhere_. So all of Emacs' basic interactions (and they may seem weird to begin with but they're honestly just trying to save your wrists some pain) work everywhere. You can always trust your intuitive, spatial model of the thing you're looking at. Search backwards in a text file, find some text, select it, copy it, go back to the end and paste it. That works exactly the same in a shell. It works exactly the same in a database client. Or SSH'd into a server. Or replying to an email. Same gestures when entering commands, same gestures moving around in autocomplete popups. Everything you learn with Emacs (and later, everything you write with elisp), has a little incremental benefit to your power and productivity manipulating text. Except everything is text, and so it all multiplies together. For whatever reason, I've been trying VSCode on Windows the last couple of weeks, coming from an Emacs on Linux background. I cannot tell you how painful I find it, even after making a pretty good attempt to map all the keys correctly (snarky sidebar, sorry: every editor and IDE has really good Vim key bindings, but terrible Emacs support. I used to feel bad about this until I realised it was a sign that Vim people clearly didn't use Vim that much, whereas Emacs people never leave Emacs). But VSCode begins at a completely different level of abstraction to Emacs. It doesn't want to show you a text-based UI everywhere, and implement tools to manipulate text. It wants to show you windows and panels and configuration screens and extensions with their own behaviour. Everything is modal and different, some windows are special, and you can't just navigate around the same way everywhere. So, sure, this isn't for everyone, but it's what I love about Emacs, to the point that the many regular indignities it forces on you (hangs if you're not careful about large files, abysmal performance of various things on Windows because of the overhead of starting processes, and sure, the learning curve for some people) are bearable because everything is so natural.

kamaal 6y ago

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

I have been using zim wiki. Its essentially just a basic text editor but it has a tree view for your files and supports basic syntax including check lists. I have found this suits basically all of my needs.

naveen99 6y ago

Checkout the emacs wiki: https://www.emacswiki.org/ https://www.emacswiki.org/ See if you find any features or extensions that aren’t available on notepad++... My .emacs configuration is based on vim style modal shortcuts that make me faster than a mutant: https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.el https://github.com/tinku99/dotfiles/blob/master/init-public.... I also use org-mode as a minor mode for autohotkey code editing, by changing the outline character from * to ; ... https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode https://github.com/tinku99/ahk-org-mode

bitwize 6y ago

Don't worry about it too much. If your workflow works for you, go nuts with it. But should you one day find yourself needing an informational omnitool that can be adapted to the task at hand while you work with it, you will find that there is simply no substitute for Emacs. And that's the difference between an extensible text editor and Emacs. A few lines of Emacs Lisp and some Unix plumbing can get you very far -- and you can debug it in production, dynamically updating the Lisp code as you use it.

machinesbuddy 6y ago

You are right if you are comfortable with your editor you're not missing a lot. I tried Emacs for a while it's nice and comfortable the moment your brain get used to the keyboard shortkeys though since it's a different word you start running everything in Emacs and it becomes your OS. Why it can be a problem is another story. Anyway I switched back to use different tools for different jobs. For taking notes and managing them I use Joplin it supports markdown, todo lists, etc. and you can even copy paste images into the editor. Lots of other features as well as sync with different backends.

clojureyoureyes 6y ago
Emacs is not about shortcuts, you can use default, CUA, viper, Evil, or even custom ones. The main things are lisp and interactive commands.

iLemming 6y ago

I have used many popular and some esoteric editors and IDEs (some of them today would be considered forgotten). The last one was IntelliJ that I used very extensively. To the point of finding some undocumented features. I have participated in many conversations regarding plugins. I have almost started building my own. I was pleased with it. JetBrains does make an incredibly powerful IDEs. After almost seven years of using IntelliJ, I switched to Emacs. Emacs taught me something about myself that no other editor/IDE done before. It helped me to discover my hidden predilection. I realized that I am a tinkerer. You may say: "Aren't we all? We make software because we are tinkerers..." But there are two kinds of developers: non-conformist tinkerers and consumer-tinkerers. People who end up using Emacs are those who would choose Gentoo or Arch, first of all, because "fuck Windows" and "Ubuntu is lame", and then because they can do some crazy stuff like hijacking display brightness beyond default limits (because one time they had to stare at it, sitting on a beach). Sometimes they hook up their garage doors to a DB, so they can collect data and analyze it later. Or they build their own mechanical keyboards. Etc. Emacs taught me to abhor repetition and mundane tasks. It taught me that anything can be automated. Even Hell and Chaos can be automated. In that case, you simply end up having an automated hell and chaos. There are so many tiny examples, like whenever I'm writing something let's say in Python, and I would like to search for a code snippet on GitHub, I would simply select a piece of code in my editor and search for it - Emacs would navigate to GitHub, pass the string and even set the language to Python. Or whenever I need to create a new branch, I don't need to think about the name, I can use the ticket number and Emacs would request the issue tracker and create a branch name based on ticket's title. Or I can create a Gist (public or private) by pressing a couple of keys. And many, many more. I can watch anyone using their favorite IDE and whenever they do something so trivial, something they've been doing for a long time, and very often I'd think - "Oh, I know, more efficient way of doing the same thing" or "Ah, I've been doing it the same way for years, maybe it's time to improve it. I just realized that this is not efficient enough." But it's not just about efficiency - when you add a tiny bit of automation to your task, it becomes so much less frustrating. Of course, it is possible to have the same mindset and never get into Emacs. However, Emacs offers hundreds of tiny pieces to satisfy your needs. People say: "Emacs takes a long time to learn", but in reality - it would take you longer to become a true power-tinkerer using any other ecosystem of tools. But it is also totally okay not to be a power-tinkerer. I know many developers who don't use any fancy ways of doing things, but they are still quite impressively, very productive.