6 ms·

> And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course

> And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things. FWIW this is something most editors let you do trivially. With VS Code, select the lines you want to sort, press Cmd-Shift-P to bring up fuzzy command search, type "sort", press enter. Your selected lines are sorted. I think you might be surprised to find that all the major editors these days have most all of the little things you might want day-to-day covered. Of course the set of little things one cares about will differ from person to person and from the capabilities we've personally found the most use out of. It's hard to argue when that one thing you use every day isn't supported in some other editor, but the list of those is shrinking quicker than I suspect most people realize. There are a lot of people contributing to these tools and that plus not having to reinvent every wheel from scratch (and maintain that code on top) means that modern editors can cut into the lead time advantage of something like Emacs quicker than you might otherwise think.

neolog 5y ago
I agree with what you say about IDEs, but Emacs' "advantage" over other text editors is that it is only superficially a text editor. It's really more of an operating system.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  How does the old joke go -- "Now if Emacs only had a decent text editor, it would be a pretty decent OS."
  - mike97 5y ago
    Evil mode
viseztrance 5y ago
I think you would still be surprised at how many things emacs can still do better like undo in region or even simple macros that find use even during simple text edits. Though ultimately feature per feature, I don't think emacs looks all that great, but the difference is that you can actually use a lot of what it has to offer whereas it's difficult to do so in more modern editors (with fuzzy matching and all).
ellyagg 5y ago
I'm a long term emacs user and I know that my emacs use is not down simply to lock-in. I know this because a year ago I spent a month using Panic Nova to see what I might be missing with emacs. Nova looked super pretty and it's easy to figure out how to do a lot of things out-of-the-box that's harder to figure out on emacs at first. But there are a couple of core things about emacs that I just don't see replicated in the popular IDEs. 1. The way you manage buffers and "windows" (just partitions of the screen in your GUI window). Buffers and windows are decoupled, which will make no sense to most people if they aren't fluent in it. And these little window partitions are quickly built, re-sized, split, and destroyed at a moment's notice from the keyboard. I can and do regularly go from 1 to 12 partitions at a moment's notice. I switch buffers in partitions constantly. I tried so hard to figure out how to not make buffer and window management suck in Nova, but to no avail. I've also done some professional development in VS Code, and it doesn't appear to be any more flexible. Maybe someone has an extension, but I doubt it. And this is too core to my development experience to trust to something as ephemeral as an extension. And emacs has already been doing it for 30 years. 2. I use emacs in the terminal, whether on my desktop or ssh'd into AWS. The development experience is 100% seamless. Being able to work remotely on any server with my exact same developer experience is huge for me. I don't have to have a mirror copy of the files and do any syncing between edits. I can use all the project management, file browsing, and directory searching features built into emacs with no problem. I'm always at home. The last thing I'll mention is that, contrary to the person having doubts in the linked article, I'm not an emacs power user. Currently I use an almost-stock spacemacs install, not even in evil-mode, and I've barely explored it. The basic emacs features I learned in the first couple months of using emacs give me more than anything I've found. I will say that if I made a whole career out of Java or .Net development, and if versatility wasn't that important, an IDE tailored to those environments would have some polish that's hard to ignore. But if I knew I was missing the foregoing, it would hurt a lot every day.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  About point 2, this can be done with vscode using this extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... This explains it https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial There's a similar extension to work within containers https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...
gumby 5y ago
I find the overhead of selecting a pop up, having it appear, often then using the mouse to select something, then pressing do is just clumsy compared to the low overhead command structure of Emacs. Search is a primary cursor move operation, for example.
- stouset 5y ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever used a mouse to operate a single function in VS Code. Literally everything (in the actually literal sense) is available through a keyboard shortcut.
kqr 5y ago
The sticking point for me is that if I discover some functionality is missing, I can add it to Emacs on the fly with often just a few (1--25) lines of Lisp. So there's several tiers to this convenience: 1. Does it do the obviously important things out of the box, or with easily installed add-ons? For most editors, this is yes. 2. Does it do the little things out of the box, or with easily installed add-ons? For some editors, this is yes. 3. If none of the above, can you create the thing you need as an add-on without breaking your step, almost as part of what you were already doing? To get to this point it takes a very dynamic system like Emacs.
jeffyang 5y ago
The thing with Emacs is that sort-lines is a string you can copy and paste into a buffer, whereas in Visual Studio it's a command that you have to execute. Disclaimer: I don't know Visual Studio that well. Still, I suspect what I'm writing is true. I wrote about this in a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104243

neolog 5y ago

I agree with what you say about IDEs, but Emacs' "advantage" over other text editors is that it is only superficially a text editor. It's really more of an operating system.

CRConrad 5y ago
How does the old joke go -- "Now if Emacs only had a decent text editor, it would be a pretty decent OS."
- mike97 5y ago
  Evil mode

viseztrance 5y ago

I think you would still be surprised at how many things emacs can still do better like undo in region or even simple macros that find use even during simple text edits. Though ultimately feature per feature, I don't think emacs looks all that great, but the difference is that you can actually use a lot of what it has to offer whereas it's difficult to do so in more modern editors (with fuzzy matching and all).

ellyagg 5y ago

I'm a long term emacs user and I know that my emacs use is not down simply to lock-in. I know this because a year ago I spent a month using Panic Nova to see what I might be missing with emacs. Nova looked super pretty and it's easy to figure out how to do a lot of things out-of-the-box that's harder to figure out on emacs at first. But there are a couple of core things about emacs that I just don't see replicated in the popular IDEs. 1. The way you manage buffers and "windows" (just partitions of the screen in your GUI window). Buffers and windows are decoupled, which will make no sense to most people if they aren't fluent in it. And these little window partitions are quickly built, re-sized, split, and destroyed at a moment's notice from the keyboard. I can and do regularly go from 1 to 12 partitions at a moment's notice. I switch buffers in partitions constantly. I tried so hard to figure out how to not make buffer and window management suck in Nova, but to no avail. I've also done some professional development in VS Code, and it doesn't appear to be any more flexible. Maybe someone has an extension, but I doubt it. And this is too core to my development experience to trust to something as ephemeral as an extension. And emacs has already been doing it for 30 years. 2. I use emacs in the terminal, whether on my desktop or ssh'd into AWS. The development experience is 100% seamless. Being able to work remotely on any server with my exact same developer experience is huge for me. I don't have to have a mirror copy of the files and do any syncing between edits. I can use all the project management, file browsing, and directory searching features built into emacs with no problem. I'm always at home. The last thing I'll mention is that, contrary to the person having doubts in the linked article, I'm not an emacs power user. Currently I use an almost-stock spacemacs install, not even in evil-mode, and I've barely explored it. The basic emacs features I learned in the first couple months of using emacs give me more than anything I've found. I will say that if I made a whole career out of Java or .Net development, and if versatility wasn't that important, an IDE tailored to those environments would have some polish that's hard to ignore. But if I knew I was missing the foregoing, it would hurt a lot every day.

nextaccountic 5y ago
About point 2, this can be done with vscode using this extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... This explains it https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh-tutorial There's a similar extension to work within containers https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

gumby 5y ago

I find the overhead of selecting a pop up, having it appear, often then using the mouse to select something, then pressing do is just clumsy compared to the low overhead command structure of Emacs. Search is a primary cursor move operation, for example.

stouset 5y ago
I don’t think I’ve ever used a mouse to operate a single function in VS Code. Literally everything (in the actually literal sense) is available through a keyboard shortcut.

kqr 5y ago

The sticking point for me is that if I discover some functionality is missing, I can add it to Emacs on the fly with often just a few (1--25) lines of Lisp. So there's several tiers to this convenience: 1. Does it do the obviously important things out of the box, or with easily installed add-ons? For most editors, this is yes. 2. Does it do the little things out of the box, or with easily installed add-ons? For some editors, this is yes. 3. If none of the above, can you create the thing you need as an add-on without breaking your step, almost as part of what you were already doing? To get to this point it takes a very dynamic system like Emacs.

jeffyang 5y ago

The thing with Emacs is that sort-lines is a string you can copy and paste into a buffer, whereas in Visual Studio it's a command that you have to execute. Disclaimer: I don't know Visual Studio that well. Still, I suspect what I'm writing is true. I wrote about this in a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104243