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I wish someone did a thorough comparison of emacs with the newer extensible editors, such as Sublime. Is there something substantial that Sublime users are miss

I wish someone did a thorough comparison of emacs with the newer extensible editors, such as Sublime. Is there something substantial that Sublime users are missing?

AJRF 6y ago
I'll give two examples to showcase features other editors are missing - ownership over the editor, and the extent to which you can build on top of existing primitives. 1. Can you change where the command palette shows up in Sublime? In emacs (M-x is our Command Palette) I can not show it, I can show it as a full width pane that takes up 50% of the screen, or I could recreate the Sublime Text look and feel (top of the screen X width, Y height). This looks like a toy example but I'm trying to show that there is not a single part of emacs I don't have control over. 2. Okay how would you do the following in sublime; Your company is getting into credit checking. As such you now are beholden to certain rules and regulations around the safety of your code, and now your product owners want an update every time CreditCheck.java is modified by someone. They want to be notified in a Slack channel and also by email. They don't care if the top 30 lines are changed, but anything after that is important. In emacs, I would make a hook for CreditCheck.java that any time I saved the file, it would run through the changes, check if there is a diff from line 31 onwards, and if so send a slack notification and send-mail the diff to the product owners. I would just open my settings.org file and add the emacs-lisp to do this and I wouldn't even need to restart to avail of it - I could just load-file and have it working. All within emacs. You could do this via a tangle of shell commands sure - but emacs lets you do it emacs-lisp with ease. Programming in the real world is full of stupid like processes like this, and emacs makes it easy to accommodate them. (Not saying that you should accommodate them, but the real world can be messy)
- sverhagen 6y ago
  I think that most companies would not find it adequate for the compliance regulations to be implemented "client-side". Mine would certainly answer your question: "how would you do the following in Sublime" with: "not at all", or: "please don't". As for your former point of configurability; all power to you; I think that there is a spectrum where many folks choose to be more on the end of the spectrum where there is paved roads of using an editor that looks a certain way through the consensus of its users. Instead of picking between a super-configurable editor and one that isn't, I think many users choose between two less so configurable editors (I imagine IntelliJ and VS Code are good examples) for the one that just suits them better than the other.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    > I think that most companies would not find it adequate for the compliance regulations to be implemented "client-side". Mine would certainly answer your question: "how would you do the following in Sublime" with: "not at all", or: "please don't". Yep, exactly. The most natural solution to this problem is some kind of git hook on the git server. Nobody cares about the changes I make locally before I push them to a branch.
    - codygman 6y ago
      The point is the level of configurability and that you can remove all sharp edges from within emacs. Then when you sync your Emacs config to your laptop, those sharp edges remain gone. Examples like this, especially those widely meaningful to everyone, are nearly impossible to craft. It's like seeing different paths of movement before trying parkour and after training a few weeks.
  - _mlxl 6y ago
    You are missing the forest for the trees here - and I imagine that's by choice. I'm not saying emacs shines as an audit trail - I am saying the processes by which you work can be incorporated within emacs very easily, in a way that is unmatched. I can see why people tend to ignore questions around specificity of why they like emacs - the goalposts never stop moving.
    - IanCal 6y ago
      > You are missing the forest for the trees here - and I imagine that's by choice. To flip this around, I'd say you're fascinated by the forest when someone else just needs a tree. I understand the excitement and the freedom you're describing. What I think you're missing is that if others don't see a need for what you're describing it not only doesn't sound useful but sounds like the tool is definitely not aimed at them. This is not them being deliberately obstinate. In the classic spirit of tortuous car analogies for technology - there is a benefit in having a car you are able to maintain yourself. But when asked why this car and not another if the examples all sound like "You could add six steering wheels and put a tyre on top and have the horn play jingle bells only on christmas if you wanted!" then it immediately puts people off.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  The OS probably has this feature - inotify/fswatch. It's not clear why you would want you text editor to do that for you. What if another program edits the file? What if you accidentally pull up notepad.exe and edit it?
- cargoshipit 6y ago
  Okay, so we need to make sure that anyone that could ever potentially edit this file has this exact same configuration setup and is using emacs? That's dumb and flaky. You sound like one of those guys that spends thousands of hours customizing/tweaking things instead of just accomplishing tasks.
  - S4M 6y ago
    You could imagine that it's a rule in the company where GP works that programmers have to notify the boss when they change CreditChecking.java. GP's colleagues who are not using emacs would have to do it manually, while GP would do it automatically.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  I never understood what people mean by the joke "emacs is a great operating system, all it needs is a decent text editor" but after reading your post I'm starting to.
ubermonkey 6y ago
I think that's a completely fair question. If you're not on desktop Linux, and you don't have years of experience using emacs, I'm not sure there's a great reason to switch to it from Sublime (or any other extensible editor) just on the merits. I tried emacs many, many times over the years, and always ended up going back to something more modern because I liked them better -- BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime, etc. (I'm leaving aside the FOSS arguments here, which are reasonable and fair; I just mean workflow/feature reasons.) All that said, I did end up converting to emacs eventually, about 5 years ago. Why? OrgMode. I couldn't find anything else that did what I really wanted in terms of note-taking and to-do tracking, and what I wanted seemed to me to be pretty simple: I wanted to be able to write in plain text, keep notes in multiple files, use outlining, and have some kind elaborate searching tool that would filter through them and show me the lines I'd marked as to-do. Interleaving the notes with the todos was mandatory for me -- I need context. Obviously, I could write something simple to do this, but OrgMode is built around this idea from the getgo and works BEAUTIFULLY. And to the best of my knowledge no such equivalent exists for Sublime, or any other extensible editor.
tomjen3 6y ago
Today I needed to be able to insert the current date in emacs and I found the lisp code to do so online, hacked it to give the output I liked and then added it to emacs - the program I used to edit the code with? The same running version of emacs that I loaded and tested the code with. I don't know any other editor that can do that.

I wish someone did a thorough comparison of emacs with the newer extensible editors, such as Sublime. Is there something substantial that Sublime users are missing?

AJRF 6y ago

I'll give two examples to showcase features other editors are missing - ownership over the editor, and the extent to which you can build on top of existing primitives. 1. Can you change where the command palette shows up in Sublime? In emacs (M-x is our Command Palette) I can not show it, I can show it as a full width pane that takes up 50% of the screen, or I could recreate the Sublime Text look and feel (top of the screen X width, Y height). This looks like a toy example but I'm trying to show that there is not a single part of emacs I don't have control over. 2. Okay how would you do the following in sublime; Your company is getting into credit checking. As such you now are beholden to certain rules and regulations around the safety of your code, and now your product owners want an update every time CreditCheck.java is modified by someone. They want to be notified in a Slack channel and also by email. They don't care if the top 30 lines are changed, but anything after that is important. In emacs, I would make a hook for CreditCheck.java that any time I saved the file, it would run through the changes, check if there is a diff from line 31 onwards, and if so send a slack notification and send-mail the diff to the product owners. I would just open my settings.org file and add the emacs-lisp to do this and I wouldn't even need to restart to avail of it - I could just load-file and have it working. All within emacs. You could do this via a tangle of shell commands sure - but emacs lets you do it emacs-lisp with ease. Programming in the real world is full of stupid like processes like this, and emacs makes it easy to accommodate them. (Not saying that you should accommodate them, but the real world can be messy)

sverhagen 6y ago
I think that most companies would not find it adequate for the compliance regulations to be implemented "client-side". Mine would certainly answer your question: "how would you do the following in Sublime" with: "not at all", or: "please don't". As for your former point of configurability; all power to you; I think that there is a spectrum where many folks choose to be more on the end of the spectrum where there is paved roads of using an editor that looks a certain way through the consensus of its users. Instead of picking between a super-configurable editor and one that isn't, I think many users choose between two less so configurable editors (I imagine IntelliJ and VS Code are good examples) for the one that just suits them better than the other.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  > I think that most companies would not find it adequate for the compliance regulations to be implemented "client-side". Mine would certainly answer your question: "how would you do the following in Sublime" with: "not at all", or: "please don't". Yep, exactly. The most natural solution to this problem is some kind of git hook on the git server. Nobody cares about the changes I make locally before I push them to a branch.
  - codygman 6y ago
    The point is the level of configurability and that you can remove all sharp edges from within emacs. Then when you sync your Emacs config to your laptop, those sharp edges remain gone. Examples like this, especially those widely meaningful to everyone, are nearly impossible to craft. It's like seeing different paths of movement before trying parkour and after training a few weeks.
- _mlxl 6y ago
  You are missing the forest for the trees here - and I imagine that's by choice. I'm not saying emacs shines as an audit trail - I am saying the processes by which you work can be incorporated within emacs very easily, in a way that is unmatched. I can see why people tend to ignore questions around specificity of why they like emacs - the goalposts never stop moving.
  - IanCal 6y ago
    > You are missing the forest for the trees here - and I imagine that's by choice. To flip this around, I'd say you're fascinated by the forest when someone else just needs a tree. I understand the excitement and the freedom you're describing. What I think you're missing is that if others don't see a need for what you're describing it not only doesn't sound useful but sounds like the tool is definitely not aimed at them. This is not them being deliberately obstinate. In the classic spirit of tortuous car analogies for technology - there is a benefit in having a car you are able to maintain yourself. But when asked why this car and not another if the examples all sound like "You could add six steering wheels and put a tyre on top and have the horn play jingle bells only on christmas if you wanted!" then it immediately puts people off.
oh_sigh 6y ago
The OS probably has this feature - inotify/fswatch. It's not clear why you would want you text editor to do that for you. What if another program edits the file? What if you accidentally pull up notepad.exe and edit it?
cargoshipit 6y ago
Okay, so we need to make sure that anyone that could ever potentially edit this file has this exact same configuration setup and is using emacs? That's dumb and flaky. You sound like one of those guys that spends thousands of hours customizing/tweaking things instead of just accomplishing tasks.
- S4M 6y ago
  You could imagine that it's a rule in the company where GP works that programmers have to notify the boss when they change CreditChecking.java. GP's colleagues who are not using emacs would have to do it manually, while GP would do it automatically.
0-_-0 6y ago
I never understood what people mean by the joke "emacs is a great operating system, all it needs is a decent text editor" but after reading your post I'm starting to.

ubermonkey 6y ago

I think that's a completely fair question. If you're not on desktop Linux, and you don't have years of experience using emacs, I'm not sure there's a great reason to switch to it from Sublime (or any other extensible editor) just on the merits. I tried emacs many, many times over the years, and always ended up going back to something more modern because I liked them better -- BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime, etc. (I'm leaving aside the FOSS arguments here, which are reasonable and fair; I just mean workflow/feature reasons.) All that said, I did end up converting to emacs eventually, about 5 years ago. Why? OrgMode. I couldn't find anything else that did what I really wanted in terms of note-taking and to-do tracking, and what I wanted seemed to me to be pretty simple: I wanted to be able to write in plain text, keep notes in multiple files, use outlining, and have some kind elaborate searching tool that would filter through them and show me the lines I'd marked as to-do. Interleaving the notes with the todos was mandatory for me -- I need context. Obviously, I could write something simple to do this, but OrgMode is built around this idea from the getgo and works BEAUTIFULLY. And to the best of my knowledge no such equivalent exists for Sublime, or any other extensible editor.

tomjen3 6y ago

Today I needed to be able to insert the current date in emacs and I found the lisp code to do so online, hacked it to give the output I liked and then added it to emacs - the program I used to edit the code with? The same running version of emacs that I loaded and tested the code with. I don't know any other editor that can do that.