6 ms·

Speaking as someone who sees a lot of students start using text editors for the first time, VSCode has two massive advantages over Emacs: 1) Most students alre

Speaking as someone who sees a lot of students start using text editors for the first time, VSCode has two massive advantages over Emacs: 1) Most students already basically know their OS's graphical interface -- the "basic keys" like cut/copy/paste/load/save all work as expected. 2) The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?" Both points are really useful for getting started quickly, but would I imagine be really hard for emacs. The first would require changing default behaviour on first startup, the second would need accepting some set of people to decide the "default" sets of plugins. For those who say "emacs is worth learning", that might be true, but when students can choose between Emacs, Vim, VSCode, nano, Intellij, pycharm, Eclipse, Atom, Sublime Text or Notepad++ (that's all the editors I think I've seen in the last year), they need a special reason to give emacs all that extra work needed to understand it. Vim/Neovim had a bump a few years ago and got really popular (although that might be over now, at least on my limited experience). I think that was because there were obvious improvements going on, which attracted students to take a look.

vintermann 5y ago
Vim is different enough that when its fans say it's superior, at least some people think it's plausible enough that it's worth learning. And even if they don't become appreciably more productive by it, at that point it's sunk cost and they might as well keep using it. The last time I had any reason to consider getting into emacs, was when I came across a proof assistant many years ago that basically required it - it used emacs to provide an interactive interface. Not unlike how everyone uses electron/chrome these days to quickly provide a familiar interactive interface. It was like an exotic artefact from a parallel universe where emacs' conventions became dominant instead of IBM and Microsoft's.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  I personally love Vim because once you know how to work it, you can code extremely quickly. You don’t really even need any macros (though they can make you even faster) — I find the default commands to be fast enough that I consider vim to be an “expert interface” for text editing. Also love the VS Code vim plug-in.
  - agentwiggles 5y ago
    The fact that vim-style modal editing can be implemented in other editors is huge. I use console vim frequently, but when I need to bump up to something more IDE-like (VSCode or a Jetbrains IDE), I can carry 99% of the vim functionality I use, and be up and running with a minute or two of config.
xroche 5y ago
> The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?" This. Used Emacs for fifteen years professionally, and I gave up when I had to reinstall my laptop, as having intellisense-like features and easy navigation in Emacs is a complete pain. I actually did not intent to switch to VSCode, but after a couple of hours of scratching my head with list configuration files, I ended up "trying" VSCode, and after a couple of _minutes_, everything was working (completion, navigation etc.) After a couple of tweaking, clangd was plugged, and I had direct visual compiler feedback in realtime while typing code in the window. VSCode is not "better". It's just another world.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  My emacs setup takes minutes to install on a new computer. I use borg, but there are many other ways to do it.
  - mr337 5y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. I use spacemacs and have moved to about 5 laptops over the last five years. Just bring along the .spacemacs files and any supporting tools like ripgrep etc and I am up and running.
  - oblio 5y ago
    How long did it take you to assemble your setup? Wall time, not fuzzy memories à la "it takes 5 minutes to cook this". My bet? Tens, if not hundreds of hours.
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      I've probably spent less than 50 hours total over 20 years on my emacs configuration. But it wasn't all at once. And now I just copy the .emacs file between systems. Tweaking it is maybe minutes a year now. If I want to do something with, say, Go, I just download the appropriate mode. The longest time spent was when I had a few bespoke languages at work that had no text editor support in any editor. I wrote some minor modes to support them, that was probably 10 hours total with most of the time on the first minor mode, and the rest flowing quickly thanks to the prior experience. EDIT: For comparison, I've probably spent 100x that (if not more) on Linux configurations.
jimbokun 5y ago
> Both points are really useful for getting started quickly, but would I imagine be really hard for emacs. The first would require changing default behaviour on first startup, the second would need accepting some set of people to decide the "default" sets of plugins. I actually don't think these are very hard from a technical perspective. The first has been done in the past. Aquamacs was a version of Emacs for Mac OS that supported conventional Mac keyboard shortcuts, in addition to the Emacs ones. The second should really just be a matter of matching certain file extensions and prompting to download the most popular mode for that file type. The Emacs package manager is very good, so it's a simple change to just include a mapping from file extension to Emacs package and trigger the prompt when opening a file of a given type for the first time.
pxc 5y ago
> 2) The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?" Spacemacs also does this, and it's a big part of why I stuck around long enough to discover some of the plugins that make the Emacs world really special, like Org mode and Magit. I'm still no Emacs hacker, but I know enough to get by, and that a good starter kit can make me productive in Emacs in just a few minutes.
- sleepycatgirl 5y ago
  Yee, very similar here, Though for me, Doom Emacs, very simple to set up, and was more or less just work for me. Though one day I will bother to configure emacs from scratch, but that day is not today.
  - pxc 5y ago
    I'm planning to use the next time I move to a new computer to switch to Doom Emacs and start over with some of my other, old dotfiles, too
gjvc 5y ago
Computer Science students would greatly benefit from an introductory-level course in the two of the most historically influential languages -- LISP and Smalltalk. Emacs as an editor does take effort to learn, and it's a different type of effort from all the other editors you mention, because they are all quite different beasts. In the end, it comes down to pedagogical considerations and how each individual learns. Emacs has suffered by having an awfully austere default installation, and Linux distributions have refrained from delivering a version with something like Doom or Prelude to make it more approachable. (Prelude is my favourite.)
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Not always with those two languages, but in many CS curricula in the US there is a "programming languages" course that covers between 4 and 10 [0] languages in different language families. Prolog and Common Lisp (or Scheme) are typically included, you may get Smalltalk in there depending on the school. It's brief, because it's one course, but it's usually a 3rd year course so students should be competent programmers by then (that is, an Algorithms 101 course but in Lisp would be a slog for them). Other schools make a point (or made, not sure the current state) of changing languages between courses in the first couple years and giving more choice to students later. Like, an OO course would have been taught with Smalltalk after an intro algorithms/data structures course sequence using Java, Python, or other languages. A compilers course may have used SML, but it wasn't an SML course, just a compilers course that happened to use SML. [0] The most I've seen, it was absurdly paced, an intern was taking that one.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    You'd certainly want to avoid spreading yourself too thin, which is why I specifically limited my hypothetical first-year module to these two languages, as they would provide the (IMHO) ideal context for learning the rest.

vintermann 5y ago

Vim is different enough that when its fans say it's superior, at least some people think it's plausible enough that it's worth learning. And even if they don't become appreciably more productive by it, at that point it's sunk cost and they might as well keep using it. The last time I had any reason to consider getting into emacs, was when I came across a proof assistant many years ago that basically required it - it used emacs to provide an interactive interface. Not unlike how everyone uses electron/chrome these days to quickly provide a familiar interactive interface. It was like an exotic artefact from a parallel universe where emacs' conventions became dominant instead of IBM and Microsoft's.

wayoutthere 5y ago
I personally love Vim because once you know how to work it, you can code extremely quickly. You don’t really even need any macros (though they can make you even faster) — I find the default commands to be fast enough that I consider vim to be an “expert interface” for text editing. Also love the VS Code vim plug-in.
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  The fact that vim-style modal editing can be implemented in other editors is huge. I use console vim frequently, but when I need to bump up to something more IDE-like (VSCode or a Jetbrains IDE), I can carry 99% of the vim functionality I use, and be up and running with a minute or two of config.

xroche 5y ago

> The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?" This. Used Emacs for fifteen years professionally, and I gave up when I had to reinstall my laptop, as having intellisense-like features and easy navigation in Emacs is a complete pain. I actually did not intent to switch to VSCode, but after a couple of hours of scratching my head with list configuration files, I ended up "trying" VSCode, and after a couple of _minutes_, everything was working (completion, navigation etc.) After a couple of tweaking, clangd was plugged, and I had direct visual compiler feedback in realtime while typing code in the window. VSCode is not "better". It's just another world.

globular-toast 5y ago
My emacs setup takes minutes to install on a new computer. I use borg, but there are many other ways to do it.
- mr337 5y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. I use spacemacs and have moved to about 5 laptops over the last five years. Just bring along the .spacemacs files and any supporting tools like ripgrep etc and I am up and running.
- oblio 5y ago
  How long did it take you to assemble your setup? Wall time, not fuzzy memories à la "it takes 5 minutes to cook this". My bet? Tens, if not hundreds of hours.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    I've probably spent less than 50 hours total over 20 years on my emacs configuration. But it wasn't all at once. And now I just copy the .emacs file between systems. Tweaking it is maybe minutes a year now. If I want to do something with, say, Go, I just download the appropriate mode. The longest time spent was when I had a few bespoke languages at work that had no text editor support in any editor. I wrote some minor modes to support them, that was probably 10 hours total with most of the time on the first minor mode, and the rest flowing quickly thanks to the prior experience. EDIT: For comparison, I've probably spent 100x that (if not more) on Linux configurations.

jimbokun 5y ago

> Both points are really useful for getting started quickly, but would I imagine be really hard for emacs. The first would require changing default behaviour on first startup, the second would need accepting some set of people to decide the "default" sets of plugins. I actually don't think these are very hard from a technical perspective. The first has been done in the past. Aquamacs was a version of Emacs for Mac OS that supported conventional Mac keyboard shortcuts, in addition to the Emacs ones. The second should really just be a matter of matching certain file extensions and prompting to download the most popular mode for that file type. The Emacs package manager is very good, so it's a simple change to just include a mapping from file extension to Emacs package and trigger the prompt when opening a file of a given type for the first time.

pxc 5y ago

> 2) The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?" Spacemacs also does this, and it's a big part of why I stuck around long enough to discover some of the plugins that make the Emacs world really special, like Org mode and Magit. I'm still no Emacs hacker, but I know enough to get by, and that a good starter kit can make me productive in Emacs in just a few minutes.

sleepycatgirl 5y ago
Yee, very similar here, Though for me, Doom Emacs, very simple to set up, and was more or less just work for me. Though one day I will bother to configure emacs from scratch, but that day is not today.
- pxc 5y ago
  I'm planning to use the next time I move to a new computer to switch to Doom Emacs and start over with some of my other, old dotfiles, too

gjvc 5y ago

Computer Science students would greatly benefit from an introductory-level course in the two of the most historically influential languages -- LISP and Smalltalk. Emacs as an editor does take effort to learn, and it's a different type of effort from all the other editors you mention, because they are all quite different beasts. In the end, it comes down to pedagogical considerations and how each individual learns. Emacs has suffered by having an awfully austere default installation, and Linux distributions have refrained from delivering a version with something like Doom or Prelude to make it more approachable. (Prelude is my favourite.)

Jtsummers 5y ago
Not always with those two languages, but in many CS curricula in the US there is a "programming languages" course that covers between 4 and 10 [0] languages in different language families. Prolog and Common Lisp (or Scheme) are typically included, you may get Smalltalk in there depending on the school. It's brief, because it's one course, but it's usually a 3rd year course so students should be competent programmers by then (that is, an Algorithms 101 course but in Lisp would be a slog for them). Other schools make a point (or made, not sure the current state) of changing languages between courses in the first couple years and giving more choice to students later. Like, an OO course would have been taught with Smalltalk after an intro algorithms/data structures course sequence using Java, Python, or other languages. A compilers course may have used SML, but it wasn't an SML course, just a compilers course that happened to use SML. [0] The most I've seen, it was absurdly paced, an intern was taking that one.
- gjvc 5y ago
  You'd certainly want to avoid spreading yourself too thin, which is why I specifically limited my hypothetical first-year module to these two languages, as they would provide the (IMHO) ideal context for learning the rest.