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The Emacs news the past few days has been disheartening. I was genuinely considering learning org-mode and giving another go at using Emacs as my primary edito

The Emacs news the past few days has been disheartening. I was genuinely considering learning org-mode and giving another go at using Emacs as my primary editor. Now I'm worried if it still makes sense to do that. Clearly a lot of people still find Emacs useful but the ecosystem seems too hard to break into. I'm still curious why Emacs hasn't obtained the same level of excitement as other editors like Vim and VS Code.

bzg 6y ago
I confirm it still makes sense. I just want to make things easier for the futur Org maintainer by spending the next few months recruiting more contributors.
hpoe 6y ago
If you have been using Vim go ahead and try doom emacs. I tried breaking into emacs before and dismissed it two times because it was too weird. But when I tried doom which is designed to use Vim keybindings and be easy for vim users to take up I found it super easy and have been loving how powerful it is. I have also heard good things about Spacemacs but I haven't tried it yet. It is a bit of a learning curve at first, but after three months I am starting to surpass my productivity on vim + bash + tmux and that's not bad considering I'd spent something like 5+ years in the previous environment.
- ecspike 6y ago
  I was an originalist on Emacs and totally agree. I tried Spacemacs and then doom and got to throw away 80% of the customizations I'd acquired over the years. The only thing that pushed me from Spacemacs, which is a nice distro, to doom was Spacemacs instability. I needed some things from the beta channel and it lived up to its name.
kstrauser 6y ago
What news did you see that was disheartening? The only story I was was that helm is being put to pasture, but that's very separate from Emacs itself. I think Emacs has missed some of the excitement of, say, VSCode because until recently it hasn't had many opinionated guides to using it (like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs). I've overheard a lot of conversations like: New user: OK, got it installed! Now what should I do? Emacser: Anything you want! New user: I want to write Python. What's a good way to do that? Emacser: Here's 47 similarly named but substantially different Python modes. Choose the one you like! New user: Which one do you like? Emacser: I started with one I found in a GitHub gist, then modified it to do remote editing over a 3270 terminal. You should check it out! New user: ... There's a lot to be said for the VSCode approach of "here's the golden path to doing ${thing}. Once you've learned it, you might try the alternatives to see if some are a better fit for you." Alternatively, consider the analogy of a Linux distro that gives you a well configured KDE or Gnome environment, but that lets you switch to another DE once you've been using it for a while. Now Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are providing that experience to new users, and I've heard more excitement about Emacs in the last couple of years than in the previous decade.
- rashkov 6y ago
  This is why I recommend spacemacs: just install the python layer, read its readme file, and get going. Emacs is like clay, but that’s only useful once you’re comfortable with it. Until then better to get an opinionated experience out of the box, and tweak it from there.
- loosetypes 6y ago
  I love emacs but lately I’ve been feeling this approach is very much at odds with today’s expectation of per-project convention-flexibility within a dialect, a la prettier.
  - kstrauser 6y ago
    Truthfully, I feel kind of the same way. There are parts of my .emacs.d/init.el that go back 25 years, so I'm not saying this from the position of "I tried it last week and it wasn't like my other editors so I don't like it." One of the things I love about VSCode, and that made me seriously evaluate it in the first place, is how easy it is to configure per-project settings like "use this virtualenv when editing these files". In VSCode, that looks like having one window per project and this works great. When I'm in the middle of working on one thing, I can quickly open a second window, hack on something, close that window, and get back to what I was doing. Since Emacs has one flat memory space, that's not nearly so easy. I love Emacs and would go back to using it in a heartbeat if it were half so easy to set up and maintain a working Python development environment with all the bells and whistles, but so far I haven't found that to be the case.
    - theCodeStig 6y ago
      Direnv and lsp-mode
rcoveson 6y ago
Vim is a whole different thing. The popularity of vim is mostly the popularity of the vim way of editing text, regardless of environment. Emacs, on the other hand, is popular as an environment. Vim, or something with "vim" in its name, will remain popular as long as keyboards remain popular. Emacs can only live as long as the intersection of the set of people who are enthusiastic about natively-extensible editing/development environments and the set of people who are enthusiastic about lisp. It's not going to live on as a set of keybinds, that's for sure.
githubalphapapa 6y ago
Please don't be disheartened. Like everything in life, software projects have natural cycles. People's free time waxes and wanes, and inspiration ebbs and flows. Unlike many software projects, ones built on Emacs are very stable in the long term, as Emacs itself takes stability and compatibility very seriously. As well, these projects have many users, many of whom are Elisp hackers, so I have no concerns about these projects' long-term health. So please don't panic just because one maintainer is preparing to reduce his activity in the project. Neither Emacs, nor Org, nor Helm are going away.
ubermonkey 6y ago
I have been emacs adjacent most of my career (I'm 50), but never really took to it until about 6 or 8 years ago. I was never a full-time Linux dev, for one thing. For another, I've spent my career about half in code or whatnot, and the other half in PowerPoint or Word communicating technical things to nontechnical people, and so lacked the long-term immersion I thought was really needed to GET emacs. What finally drove me to it was Org. I got super tired of proprietary to-do/data managers evolving away from my needs. The last example was the VERY popular OmniFocus, which had a major rev that introduced tons of whitespace and thereby killed the "high data concentration" view that I wanted. OF was also pretty crap at something else I really wanted, which was the ability to have TODO tagged items in my notes. It could almost do that, but not really. And, of course, Omnifocus files are opaque. Orgmode is exactly what I wanted. I have a huge corpus of files that are searchable with almost immediate speed (via Deft), and Org itself is awesome at pulling the TODO items out of a notes outline. I manage a whole bunch of client relationships/implementations, so I have a file for each customer. I can easily scroll back and review the history of a deal/engagement, see what was discussed and what was decided, and also see all the todo items that I noted and did, and when they were done. The agenda function means I can see a review of all the active TODO items across all the org files super super easily. The tl;dr is that it's SUPER powerful, and will absolutely reward you spending a couple days figuring out how to make it work for you. There's a bunch of very generous people in /r/emacs and /r/orgmode who will help you, too, if you get stuck. I strongly suggest you give it a try. I don't edit EVERYTHING in emacs now, but org has me pulled in enough that, unless it's an email or a real document, I'm probably in emacs.

bzg 6y ago

I confirm it still makes sense. I just want to make things easier for the futur Org maintainer by spending the next few months recruiting more contributors.

hpoe 6y ago

If you have been using Vim go ahead and try doom emacs. I tried breaking into emacs before and dismissed it two times because it was too weird. But when I tried doom which is designed to use Vim keybindings and be easy for vim users to take up I found it super easy and have been loving how powerful it is. I have also heard good things about Spacemacs but I haven't tried it yet. It is a bit of a learning curve at first, but after three months I am starting to surpass my productivity on vim + bash + tmux and that's not bad considering I'd spent something like 5+ years in the previous environment.

ecspike 6y ago
I was an originalist on Emacs and totally agree. I tried Spacemacs and then doom and got to throw away 80% of the customizations I'd acquired over the years. The only thing that pushed me from Spacemacs, which is a nice distro, to doom was Spacemacs instability. I needed some things from the beta channel and it lived up to its name.

kstrauser 6y ago

What news did you see that was disheartening? The only story I was was that helm is being put to pasture, but that's very separate from Emacs itself. I think Emacs has missed some of the excitement of, say, VSCode because until recently it hasn't had many opinionated guides to using it (like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs). I've overheard a lot of conversations like: New user: OK, got it installed! Now what should I do? Emacser: Anything you want! New user: I want to write Python. What's a good way to do that? Emacser: Here's 47 similarly named but substantially different Python modes. Choose the one you like! New user: Which one do you like? Emacser: I started with one I found in a GitHub gist, then modified it to do remote editing over a 3270 terminal. You should check it out! New user: ... There's a lot to be said for the VSCode approach of "here's the golden path to doing ${thing}. Once you've learned it, you might try the alternatives to see if some are a better fit for you." Alternatively, consider the analogy of a Linux distro that gives you a well configured KDE or Gnome environment, but that lets you switch to another DE once you've been using it for a while. Now Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are providing that experience to new users, and I've heard more excitement about Emacs in the last couple of years than in the previous decade.

rashkov 6y ago
This is why I recommend spacemacs: just install the python layer, read its readme file, and get going. Emacs is like clay, but that’s only useful once you’re comfortable with it. Until then better to get an opinionated experience out of the box, and tweak it from there.
loosetypes 6y ago
I love emacs but lately I’ve been feeling this approach is very much at odds with today’s expectation of per-project convention-flexibility within a dialect, a la prettier.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  Truthfully, I feel kind of the same way. There are parts of my .emacs.d/init.el that go back 25 years, so I'm not saying this from the position of "I tried it last week and it wasn't like my other editors so I don't like it." One of the things I love about VSCode, and that made me seriously evaluate it in the first place, is how easy it is to configure per-project settings like "use this virtualenv when editing these files". In VSCode, that looks like having one window per project and this works great. When I'm in the middle of working on one thing, I can quickly open a second window, hack on something, close that window, and get back to what I was doing. Since Emacs has one flat memory space, that's not nearly so easy. I love Emacs and would go back to using it in a heartbeat if it were half so easy to set up and maintain a working Python development environment with all the bells and whistles, but so far I haven't found that to be the case.
  - theCodeStig 6y ago
    Direnv and lsp-mode

rcoveson 6y ago

Vim is a whole different thing. The popularity of vim is mostly the popularity of the vim way of editing text, regardless of environment. Emacs, on the other hand, is popular as an environment. Vim, or something with "vim" in its name, will remain popular as long as keyboards remain popular. Emacs can only live as long as the intersection of the set of people who are enthusiastic about natively-extensible editing/development environments and the set of people who are enthusiastic about lisp. It's not going to live on as a set of keybinds, that's for sure.

githubalphapapa 6y ago

Please don't be disheartened. Like everything in life, software projects have natural cycles. People's free time waxes and wanes, and inspiration ebbs and flows. Unlike many software projects, ones built on Emacs are very stable in the long term, as Emacs itself takes stability and compatibility very seriously. As well, these projects have many users, many of whom are Elisp hackers, so I have no concerns about these projects' long-term health. So please don't panic just because one maintainer is preparing to reduce his activity in the project. Neither Emacs, nor Org, nor Helm are going away.

ubermonkey 6y ago

I have been emacs adjacent most of my career (I'm 50), but never really took to it until about 6 or 8 years ago. I was never a full-time Linux dev, for one thing. For another, I've spent my career about half in code or whatnot, and the other half in PowerPoint or Word communicating technical things to nontechnical people, and so lacked the long-term immersion I thought was really needed to GET emacs. What finally drove me to it was Org. I got super tired of proprietary to-do/data managers evolving away from my needs. The last example was the VERY popular OmniFocus, which had a major rev that introduced tons of whitespace and thereby killed the "high data concentration" view that I wanted. OF was also pretty crap at something else I really wanted, which was the ability to have TODO tagged items in my notes. It could almost do that, but not really. And, of course, Omnifocus files are opaque. Orgmode is exactly what I wanted. I have a huge corpus of files that are searchable with almost immediate speed (via Deft), and Org itself is awesome at pulling the TODO items out of a notes outline. I manage a whole bunch of client relationships/implementations, so I have a file for each customer. I can easily scroll back and review the history of a deal/engagement, see what was discussed and what was decided, and also see all the todo items that I noted and did, and when they were done. The agenda function means I can see a review of all the active TODO items across all the org files super super easily. The tl;dr is that it's SUPER powerful, and will absolutely reward you spending a couple days figuring out how to make it work for you. There's a bunch of very generous people in /r/emacs and /r/orgmode who will help you, too, if you get stuck. I strongly suggest you give it a try. I don't edit EVERYTHING in emacs now, but org has me pulled in enough that, unless it's an email or a real document, I'm probably in emacs.