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This is something I wish someone had told me 20 years ago when I first started using emacs. The whole "it's a text editor, but also it's not really a text edito
by krylon 5y ago
This is something I wish someone had told me 20 years ago when I first started using emacs. The whole "it's a text editor, but also it's not really a text editor"-thing was very confusing initially.
... Although, now that I think about it, being told this mind-blowing revelation about the emacs nature might have confused me even more.
What I love about emacs is that I have a variety - an extensible variety! - of programs under one roof, so to speak, sharing the same - customizable! - keyboard shortcuts that comfortably integrate with each other.
I think the main problem in "proselytizing" emacs to potential new users is that it is kind of the C++ of text editors, in the sense that it takes a very big up front investment that does pay off in a big way if you persist, but getting to that point took - at least for me - a multi-year commitment. It is hard to sell someone on that unless they want to do it anyway. I did it out of fun and curiosity, but if you view it as an investment in purely transactional terms, it's hard to sell.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoYou just succinctly described why my annual attempts to learn Emacs never actually go anywhere. As much as I like the idea of an all-purpose text processor construction kit, even with "starter kits" I spend a week trying to configure various languages to a point that I'm happy, find myself copying, pasting and tweaking Lisp code, invariably find weird conflicts that lead me to do web searches (which may find more Lisp code, which may be a decade out of date), and so on. I don't doubt that if I kept at it I'd eventually reach nirvana, but I frequently find myself thinking "this was just so much easier in Vim" -- and any time anything can be described as "easier in Vim", it feels like a sign of a UX problem. :)
- krylon 5y agosigh I cannot blame you. And if vi makes you happy, I want you to enjoy the heck out of it. Between discovering emacs and making it my editor of choice I spent a few years using vi heavily, and to this day, I reflexively use it for quickly editing config files. Regarding emacs, all I can say is that, in my experience, it gets better if you really stick with it for a while. The payoff is huge if you put in the time. But time is limited resource, vi gives you a payoff much faster, so ... like I said, if it works you, don't fix what ain't broken. I love Emacs, but I also love the variety of editors programmers can choose from. With programmers' editors, as with society as a whole, I consider diversity an advantage.
- hosh 5y agoDoes that include Spacemacs? It didn't take me a week to get up and running from switching from vim.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoIt does, although I've gathered that I managed to try my last attempt during a period when the released version was unusually buggy around the margins. What I'd frequently find was variants of what usually happened to me with Emacs: (1) find something that wasn't enabled that I wanted to do that could (apparently) be solved by enabling a layer (or installing a package or two), (2) enable that layer (or install that package or two), (3) immediately be confronted with unexpected error messages, (4) go on a bug hunt in which at least half the web search results were variants of "I ran into these unexpected error messages, how can I fix this". My impression -- obviously as an outsider! -- is that Emacs' immense flexibility comes at the cost of providing a lot more surface area for packages to get in one another's way. When that happens, you need to be willing and able to untangle things -- and while each individual tangle is rarely a big ask, they can add up, especially when you're coming from VSCode or Sublime Text or what have you.