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> Although I personally don't recommend it, but have you heard of Customize in Emacs? I have, I've tried it, and it's terrible compared to virtually any other

> Although I personally don't recommend it, but have you heard of Customize in Emacs? I have, I've tried it, and it's terrible compared to virtually any other editor's equivalent for editing preferences/settings. It's super hard to navigate and search, it's difficult to figure out the terminology if you don't already know it, it's unclear how various settings affect one another, and IIRC it can actually make changes to your configuration file that conflict with editing it in any other way. To be fair, I am not a regular Emacs user, but getting sucked into the insanely frustrating tar pit of Customize made Emacs seem far more inscrutable to me for years. If I could suggest just one change to make Emacs feel more "modern," it would be to entirely redo the Customize section to make it behave more like VS Code's preference system: one single page with collapsible headings, clear descriptions, and perhaps a super-top-level "behavior" control that makes batch changes to make Emacs more comfortable for users coming from different editors (e.g., choosing between a Canonical Emacs mode, Vim mode, or CUA mode). It doesn't have to try to cover every possible setting -- just hit the top several dozen and then say "for everything else, there's Lisp". > Vim is also beginner hostile, so the beginner hostility really isn't the reason for Emacs's low usage. This strikes me as half-correct, as someone who's made serious attempts with both of these editors. They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was always much easier for me to tweak and configure. That may sound nuts, but editing .vimrc feels like editing an INI file, and at least in my experience, Vim's plugins are much better behaved when it comes to not stomping on one another. Every attempt I've made at getting serious with Emacs has ended in spending hours trying to get two or three extensions I want to use to play nicely with each other; with Vim (or VS Code), this almost never happens. I've long suspected Emacs's greatest strength is also its greatest liability: you can do almost anything with it if you learn Emacs Lisp, but it often feels like you must learn Emacs Lisp to do almost anything with it. > Most people new to, say, Visual Studio don't start with "How do I download plugins". Not to pile on with the other reply, but, well: editors like Visual Studio Code, Atom, Panic's new Mac-only editor Nova, and even Sublime Text to a degree actually make plugins front and center. It's a very different approach than what Emacs and Vim have historically taken, but I think it's contributed greatly to their mindshare. VS Code in particular goes out of its way to recommend plugins to you based on the files that you've recently edited.

BeetleB 6y ago
> If I could suggest just one change to make Emacs feel more "modern," it would be to entirely redo the Customize section to make it behave more like VS Code's preference system It's probably not hard for someone to do that with Emacs - all the bits and pieces are there. I wouldn't be opposed to this. > They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was always much easier for me to tweak and configure. At the risk of starting a pointless war, I suspect it may be because Vim just has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs does. Many people have wanted Org mode in Vim, and no one has been able to make a good one. > when it comes to not stomping on one another. Every attempt I've made at getting serious with Emacs has ended in spending hours trying to get two or three extensions I want to use to play nicely with each other I believe you because this complaint does come up from time to time. I must have been simply lucky that this has been a very rare problem for me. In fact, I often tell people Emacs is great because one can take disparate packages and use them together to get powerful features. To me it exemplifies the UNIX philosophy of combining tools better than most UNIX utilities themselves do. The worst I've encountered is a conflicting keybinding. > you can do almost anything with it if you learn Emacs Lisp, but it often feels like you must learn Emacs Lisp to do almost anything with it. I view that as one of the biggest myths. I was a power user for about a decade before I learned to even write a loop in Emacs lisp. The most I knew was setting the value of variables. That's enough to be a power user. Now that I know Emacs lisp, I don't have a burst of productivity compared to when I was ignorant. I've customized to solve a few annoying problems, but I've not had any moments of "Oh man, I wish I knew how to do this all these years." I don't encourage Emacs users to learn elisp. If I ranked things they should explore in Emacs, there would be a lot of stuff higher on that list than learning elisp (org-mode, etc).
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I'm not actually sure Vim has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs at this point. I've made recent attempts to make good friends with both Vim and Emacs, and have experience with Emacs 27 and Vim 8. In my hopefully not too cynical observation, Vim fans tend to overestimate Emacs's complexity and capacity to be confusing (even saying this as someone who has admitted to being confused by Emacs!), while Emacs fans tend to underestimate modern Vim's capability. I am not sure whether I just have bad luck with Emacs extensions. :) I suspect it depends on what languages you're delving into; I found trying to get HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript modes all playing nicely together (literally, since the same file could technically have all four, with a secondary template language thrown in for good measure!) challenging. But that particular adventure was a while ago. (My most recent attempt was with Spacemacs, which, uh, I'll just say it has some great color schemes.) Re: Emacs Lisp: well, I did say "often feels like," not "actually is." :) I'm sure you're right; it's just that sense that a lot of early problems get solved by "to do the thing you want to do, paste this code into your init file," and getting past the feeling that you're assembling a configuration you don't reallllllly understand -- and thus may not be able to debug if something goes wrong -- can be a hurdle.

BeetleB 6y ago

> If I could suggest just one change to make Emacs feel more "modern," it would be to entirely redo the Customize section to make it behave more like VS Code's preference system It's probably not hard for someone to do that with Emacs - all the bits and pieces are there. I wouldn't be opposed to this. > They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was always much easier for me to tweak and configure. At the risk of starting a pointless war, I suspect it may be because Vim just has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs does. Many people have wanted Org mode in Vim, and no one has been able to make a good one. > when it comes to not stomping on one another. Every attempt I've made at getting serious with Emacs has ended in spending hours trying to get two or three extensions I want to use to play nicely with each other I believe you because this complaint does come up from time to time. I must have been simply lucky that this has been a very rare problem for me. In fact, I often tell people Emacs is great because one can take disparate packages and use them together to get powerful features. To me it exemplifies the UNIX philosophy of combining tools better than most UNIX utilities themselves do. The worst I've encountered is a conflicting keybinding. > you can do almost anything with it if you learn Emacs Lisp, but it often feels like you must learn Emacs Lisp to do almost anything with it. I view that as one of the biggest myths. I was a power user for about a decade before I learned to even write a loop in Emacs lisp. The most I knew was setting the value of variables. That's enough to be a power user. Now that I know Emacs lisp, I don't have a burst of productivity compared to when I was ignorant. I've customized to solve a few annoying problems, but I've not had any moments of "Oh man, I wish I knew how to do this all these years." I don't encourage Emacs users to learn elisp. If I ranked things they should explore in Emacs, there would be a lot of stuff higher on that list than learning elisp (org-mode, etc).

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I'm not actually sure Vim has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs at this point. I've made recent attempts to make good friends with both Vim and Emacs, and have experience with Emacs 27 and Vim 8. In my hopefully not too cynical observation, Vim fans tend to overestimate Emacs's complexity and capacity to be confusing (even saying this as someone who has admitted to being confused by Emacs!), while Emacs fans tend to underestimate modern Vim's capability. I am not sure whether I just have bad luck with Emacs extensions. :) I suspect it depends on what languages you're delving into; I found trying to get HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript modes all playing nicely together (literally, since the same file could technically have all four, with a secondary template language thrown in for good measure!) challenging. But that particular adventure was a while ago. (My most recent attempt was with Spacemacs, which, uh, I'll just say it has some great color schemes.) Re: Emacs Lisp: well, I did say "often feels like," not "actually is." :) I'm sure you're right; it's just that sense that a lot of early problems get solved by "to do the thing you want to do, paste this code into your init file," and getting past the feeling that you're assembling a configuration you don't reallllllly understand -- and thus may not be able to debug if something goes wrong -- can be a hurdle.