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Emacs looks like shit though, requires tons of time requiring to set it up and it still won't have the same insane functionality that Visual Studio does. Are yo

Emacs looks like shit though, requires tons of time requiring to set it up and it still won't have the same insane functionality that Visual Studio does. Are you really trying to compare the two things? If you are then I would suggest it's because you haven't tried VS recently and realized the huge functionality it has... I mean, does Emacs have a whole UI for handling unit tests which can be made to run automatically anytime code is changed? Does Emacs have contextual right click menus for almost any eventuality? Does Emacs have a visual browser for your code? Can you debug graphics pipelines (with previews of the output images) in Emacs? Does Emacs have built in code performance analysis tools? etc etc etc etc I could go on for ages here. You try and compare Live Share with multi-tty? What a joke! Have you seen LiveShare and what it actually offers? Easy to use, amazing UI, you can see where the other person is clicking etc etc. The reason people use these tools is because they accessible, easy to use, and "just work." This is the opposite of Emacs. Yes you can add "some" extra functionality by Frankensteining Emacs but it is about 1% of Visual Studio out of the box and convincing any of your co-workers to go through the pain of trying to emulate VS in Emacs is a fantasy, and then having to keep it updated and not broken... hahaha.

hhmc 6y ago
> they accessible, easy to use, and "just work." ..unless you happen to not be on Windows.
NateEag 6y ago
You're absolutely right that you pay a price for using Emacs, and that not having some awesome IDE features is part of that price. Another part is having to look for and install the third-party modules that make it actually work well (most of them are not included in Emacs because of Stallman and the FSF being ideologues). As you say, keeping it updated and not broken is yet another part of the price. That said, it's clear from your comment that you have not given Emacs a serious try, at least not recently. There's no reason you have to, but you probably shouldn't complain about it so vociferously if you haven't. Right-click menus that cover most use cases (jump to def, find references, format code, etc) are absolutely a thing with lsp-mode (which is not too hard to set up itself - install it via the built-in package installation UI, install language servers, and tell emacs to use lsp-mode in programming languages). There are unit testing modes that kick off tests automatically on changes and let you know if everything passed (or give you a list of failures when some tests didn't). I've not used those myself so I can't speak to their quality, but they definitely exist. Further, these tools work for a wide array of languages, with the exact same interface for all of them (and an incredibly discoverable, extensible one). Some of us like that a lot, as well as the comfort of having all the code to reproduce our setup directly to hand. I probably have several more decades in this game, so losing my environment to an IDE company going broke or getting bought is not a pleasant thought. Tradeoffs, for sure, but with valid arguments for both sides.

hhmc 6y ago

> they accessible, easy to use, and "just work." ..unless you happen to not be on Windows.

NateEag 6y ago

You're absolutely right that you pay a price for using Emacs, and that not having some awesome IDE features is part of that price. Another part is having to look for and install the third-party modules that make it actually work well (most of them are not included in Emacs because of Stallman and the FSF being ideologues). As you say, keeping it updated and not broken is yet another part of the price. That said, it's clear from your comment that you have not given Emacs a serious try, at least not recently. There's no reason you have to, but you probably shouldn't complain about it so vociferously if you haven't. Right-click menus that cover most use cases (jump to def, find references, format code, etc) are absolutely a thing with lsp-mode (which is not too hard to set up itself - install it via the built-in package installation UI, install language servers, and tell emacs to use lsp-mode in programming languages). There are unit testing modes that kick off tests automatically on changes and let you know if everything passed (or give you a list of failures when some tests didn't). I've not used those myself so I can't speak to their quality, but they definitely exist. Further, these tools work for a wide array of languages, with the exact same interface for all of them (and an incredibly discoverable, extensible one). Some of us like that a lot, as well as the comfort of having all the code to reproduce our setup directly to hand. I probably have several more decades in this game, so losing my environment to an IDE company going broke or getting bought is not a pleasant thought. Tradeoffs, for sure, but with valid arguments for both sides.