47 ms·

Why Emacs: Redux

270 points by winkywooster 5y ago

mettamage 5y ago
When I meet quite practical devs that are into PHP or Java, they always recommend IntelliJ. Can anyone of that crowd that also have a solid understanding of Emacs do a short comparison between the two? I'd really appreciate it. Currently, I've only mustered enough courage and time to understand enough of vim to not feel scared of it anymore (vimtutor was the silver bullet for me there, learning enough vim in an hour to feel fine with it).
- prohobo 5y ago
  I think it's as simple as: Emacs is like VS Code, IntelliJ is like Visual Studio. JetBrains makes great IDEs, and you should use them if you're working on a large project that one of those IDEs is geared towards. It'd take a lot of work to get any other editor to have the same feature-set and organization of workspace. Emacs is a general-purpose environment for writing, and you should use it if you want a specific flow for writing code, or anything else. You can setup plugins so that it's like a mini IDE for most of the languages you write in, and you can setup plugins to modify the organization of your workspace. You want tabs? Add them. You want a tree view of your current project folder? Add one. You want Vim-style editing? Enable it. Etc. Right now it seems everyone is looking for a code editor that is extensible and fast - Emacs fits that bill better than VS Code (also Neovim might end up being even better!), but it's more difficult to get it right. That's why there are projects like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs to make adding/removing plugins easier, and also have a good setup out of the box.
- r3n 5y ago
  I use both for almost 10 years, here are my experiences: The main advantage of IntelliJ or any other IDE by JetBrains over Emacs, is that the out of box experience IDE provided, especially from a new programmer's perspective. All they need to do to click a button, check few checkbox, then IDE will resolve it for you and tell you what happened. But to make Emacs do any complex behaviors, you usually have to write additional codes or configurations to glue different features together. Not to mention you need to read documents and debug it when there is an error. In JetBrains IDEs those are integrated already. A context-aware error detection and code inspection is available the second you open the IDE first time. That is something default Emacs can never do. The main advantage on Emacs over IDEs, is that you can ask Emacs to do whatever you want as long as you know how to implement it. Practically speaking, you most likely will accumulate many little functions over time that is specific designed for your workflows. That kind of customizability is something IDEs cannot provide. I do not consider myself an Emacs power user, but I still benefit form it. Emacs is also have better text editing features in general. You can use the same features no matter what text file you are editing. That's why people want to use Emacs for everything. In short, they are different tools, use it where it is suitable for you. For me, I whine about how bad the editor is when I use IDE, then I complain about how bad the integration my Emacs has between multiple tools (mainly my inability to make it work). Hope this give you some ideas.
  - heavenlyblue 5y ago
    Why would I need emacs for "complex behaviours" if I have <insert any programming language> installed on my computer? For example, I made a lot of scripts in Python to refactor codebases by automatically splitting files (including imports). Could I do that with emacs? Probably yes. But why? For most intents and purposes it doesn't matter if your "automated editing" environment is integrated in your editor.
rvieira 5y ago
Emacs is my personal little starship that helps me cruise the vast universe of computers :)
dang 5y ago
The earlier article, discussed at the time: Why Emacs? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256721 - Nov 2011 (128 comments)
- bozhidar 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing!
rackjack 5y ago
Org-mode is Emacs's "killer library" for me.
- Phenix88be 5y ago
  Also magit !
  - tcmart14 5y ago
    Magit is what got me hooked. I just find it the best way to interface with git other than via the terminal.
  - kdtsh 5y ago
    Absolutely. git at the command line works fine but I have always found it very dense, and prefer to use it only for very basic or very specific tasks. Magit makes all the usual things I do with git so easy. I have been using Emacs on Windows for a couple of years, but I have been transitioning to using Linux full-time at work, and by the end of the year I won't have to deal with the slowness of Magit (and git in general) under Windows.
michaericalribo 5y ago
> Beware - Emacs is highly addictive and it might easily consume years of your life! I agree with that wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong—I love emacs and I’ll be the first to talk your ear off about it. But it’s a hobby, and not necessarily worth the time investment compared with other editors, if you’re looking for something that “just works” and has all the modern features.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Agreed. I find myself struggling to recommend it to newcomers - it is just so esoteric to anyone used to ctrl+C for copy. But I can't imagine life without it. At my last job, I was forced to use PyCharm. Fine an IDE it probably is, I hated every second of it. Within 3 days I ditched it for Emacs.
  - G3rn0ti 5y ago
    > it is just so esoteric to anyone used to ctrl+C for copy Come on. „CUA mode“ exists since the 90s. ;)
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      I assume you're being sarcastic, but an Emacs beginner has no idea what 'CUA mode' is. Jokes aside, Emacs UX is just completely different to anything modern. Computer users not enlightened by Emacsen try to press Esc to get out of trouble, assume scrolling doesn't move the cursor, etc. Chorded keybindings are a mind-blow, and they have their own further pitfalls too. I either got used to Emacs behaviours, or find them superior (can't tell which one) but frankly I think they might be a big deterrent. For new users, it must be like getting into a car where all the controls are different. Brake and accelerator swapped, clutch is hand-operated (and woe to you if you've only driven automatic), stems are swapped, and some vital controls are operated by pressing buttons with the top of your head. Computer programs of the past 20 years have some basic common behaviours that are almost synonymous with basic IT skills, and Emacs diverges in many of them. I adopted Emacs in the relative modernity of 2012, when I joined a mostly-airgapped Linux environment and needed a power editor. I persevered and grew to love Emacs, but frankly if I could have downloaded VS Code or Pycharm, I probably would have done.
bradrn 5y ago
As a devoted Emacs user I think the following is really the most important part of the article: > Emacs is not really an editor either! I believe that Emacs is the ultimate editor building material. The out-of-the-box experience is kind of basic and somewhat weird, but I don’t think that anyone should be using Emacs like this. You take this simple foundation, you shape and mold it to your taste and preferences and you end up with the best possible editor for you and you alone. That’s the reason why you should consider using Emacs. … For me, personally, the ability to extend Emacs easily with Emacs Lisp remains its number one advantage over vim. There’s also the fact that you can re-create much of the vim experience with Emacs, but you’ll be hard pressed to re-create the Emacs experience in vim. For me, this is really the key attraction of Emacs. It’s not an editor; it’s a library for me to build my own ideal editor. And, in the long term, there are very few editors which can compete with this.
- kqr 5y ago
  For me, this is a bit similar to how Linux is not really an OS, it's a set of tools with which you can build your own ideal OS. This means everyone who likes "Linux" likes a different configuration.
- lvncelot 5y ago
  I'm currently in the process of moving from vim to emacs, and I've noticed that the only things from vim I really need are the modal editing and the basic keybindings - everything else, like the plugins I've come to love, are more or less interchangable, and from what I've seen, more than plentiful in emacs-land. I think comparing emacs to vim as "editors" creates a false dichotomy, one that has kept me from trying emacs for too long.
  - Ketan-fullstack 5y ago
    Modal editing is what made me go back to vim after 2 months of wanting to like emacs. Even with EVIL mode it didn't feel just as smooth. Are there other ways to get modal editing in emacs?
    - 5y ago
Kessler83 5y ago
I find it doesn't really matter what I'm interested in (computer-wise)---Emacs has me covered. It saves a huge amount of time to not have to relearn a new IDE each time I need to switch programming language. There is always more about Emacs to explore, but it is well invested time, as I know that Emacs is going to be around most likely for the rest of my life-time. The killer features for me are: + Org-mode + SLIME (Common Lisp IDE) + A Lisp as "extension" language (it isn't really extension---Emacs is fundamentally reprogrammable). + Really smooth integration of LaTeX, Dot and Tikz. + Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. Also, I find that for me, Emacs has ergonomically good key-bindings once I accepted that they are different, learned them properly and did the CAPS-Ctrl switch.
- yissp 5y ago
  It seems a bit disingenuous to say "emacs can do everything" citing org, slime, and auctex, which are probably the three highest-quality extensions out there (maybe throw in magit too). In my experience this level of polish is not consistent, e.g. python or java support is much less robust. Emacs is indeed great for many things, but not everything.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    Java support is, unfortunately, iffy in every editor that isn't made by JetBrains. I've recently got Python working well. It can be done. The deeper problem - and this is admittedly ubiquitous in emacs - is that the defaults are awful, and there is not even good discoverable official documentation about what configuration you should use because everyone's just a wee bit too content to allow, "We have a very welcoming community on IRC!" to stand in for a proper new user experience.
    - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
      > I've recently got Python working well I can't complain about Python except I didn't succeed in using the projects local pipenv automatically.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DonHopkins 5y ago
>One thing hasn’t changed though - I still love Emacs and I’m quite passionate about it. As passionate in your love for Emacs as Kyle Machulis is? ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207607 https://github.com/qdot/deldo https://github.com/qdot/deldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo
bborud 5y ago
What made me switch to VS Code (after using Emacs for 30+ years) was that I got tired of just how much of an easter egg hunt Emacs is for me now. Setting up Emacs reasonably for Go development just isn't even close to being straightforward. And with Go, go tooling and Emacs continually being changed, any setup that works will eventually stop working and you have to try to figure out how to rewrite your configuration. This happens often enough that even someone like me, who really, really didn't want to ditch emacs, eventually may do so. I appreciate all the work that has gone into Emacs, but the feeling I get is that the project lacks enough active developers and/or the focus misses the mark. I see version numbers going up - I don't see visible improvement. The goalposts moved. They are farther afield. Expectations of what an environment has to offer have gone up. If a decent developer experience isn't an understood priority, then Emacs isn't going to be very attractive for new developers. And it may have problems both attracting new users and developers and retaining new developers. (That being said: VS Code is apparently going through a rough patch where things have gotten really buggy if you use it for Go development. So it isn't like VS Code is a magic bullet)
- throwawy6sgd32 5y ago
  This is unbelievable to me who has been emacs user for this long. What i have seen so far is people whos customize heavily and use as a way of life or people who don't like after trying for some time and move away to other editors. There is another category of people who use for a specific purpose regularly(like org mode users) without making any customization or learning elisp. But your case is special. What is your level of mastery in emacs and elisp?
  - bborud 5y ago
    I used to have a decent working knowledge of Emacs Lisp, but I wouldn't use words like "mastery". I could get stuff done. However, I haven't done any development in elisp for at least 15 years. Think of it has car ownership: I might have been interested in repairing my own car in the past, now I just want a car that does what it says on the tin and not have to futz around with it. I used to have a highly customized Emacs setup with a lot of code that would automate lots of tasks for different programming languages and environments. I essentially ended up using an email reader that I found somewhere and then rewrote to include a lot of automation of the way I did my email. Of course, things changed over time. My customizations started breaking - more and faster each year. I went from having my email delivered on a traditional mailbox file, to using IMAP. Along the way I had to use POP (because I could emulate having a mailbox file) the client needed a major rewrite to deal with IMAP and in the middle of the rewrite I gave up because something else broke. I have always worked on multiple machines, so I had to synchronize setups - sometimes between machines with different emacs versions. I used Emacs for fewer and fewer things until it was only used for writing code and markdown files. Heavily customizing anything is risky because at some point you become the sole maintainer of a lot of code. At one point I'd spend perhaps 2-3 days per month programming Emacs Lisp - which, at the time, was not all that great. I don't customize software I depend on that much anymore. Including keybindings. It is cheaper to try to learn defaults, and if you put your ego aside, usually not that big of a deal. This doesn't mean you can't add functionality or customize it - it just means you shouldn't have to rewire the innards to accomplish it. Sadly, in Emacs, "extensions" are, to put it mildly, a rough ride. And more so the more you customize. Things are a bit too "freeform". You end up saying no to a lot of things you could have had for free because things start to clash with your customizations. "You broke it, now you own it". I have a very clear benchmark for what might bring me back to Emacs: be able to set up Emacs from scratch in 10 minutes so that I can program in Go, have good language server support, easy access to documentation, and a lot of the things I used to have before, but which simply rotted away over the past few years. ....and then not have it break in a way that requires more than a couple of minutes of my attention for a year.
G3rn0ti 5y ago
> I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Emacs and vim are the only editors that stood the test of time This is the main reason I keep using Emacs for my everyday use. I never thought it was simply the best editor you could imagine. But it’s an editor I could always rely on. There have been so many editors and IDEs in the past with their shiny features, great UIs and everybody screaming of excitement — until they were replaced by the next new shiny editor after a couple of years. VSCode is surely a nice editor. (Although I don’t think its pixel dust UI is particularly great. And don’t get me started on its memory consumption.) Microsoft’s LSP, however, is a great idea. Emacs absorbed this feature already and will make it available even long after everybody stopped using VSCode within a couple of years. Editors fall out of fashion. People die. Emacs remains Emacs.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  VS code has been my standby for years but the number of times it wants to restart for updates drives me up a wall, and what do I get for allowing constant updates? A giant modal popup [0] asking if I trust a folder enough to let VSC run automated scripts. Yes it’s configurable but i value default setups so I can more easily wipe my OS without reconfiguring everything. I watched a video on JetBrains [1] and the keyboard shortcuts and navigation look genuinely well thought out, so I’ll be giving that a try (with a vim emulation plugin, naturally) [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/126310 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/126310 [1] https://youtu.be/x8y_6Gg28GI https://youtu.be/x8y_6Gg28GI
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    I live in Intellij, it has it's own minor warts but it's a superpower compared to anything else I've used. It covers everything (code, inspections, docker, database layer, seamless multilanguage support).
    - ungamed 5y ago
      Except for -really- big projects, like the linux kernel. Its indexing is.. not fun.
Zababa 5y ago
> I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Emacs and vim are the only editors that stood the test of time, and I have a feeling they will be with us for decades to come. This means that an investment in them will be likely paying you dividends much longer than an investment in a newer editor or IDE. The thing the author seems to forget is that you don't need to "invest" anything to learn VSCode. I also wouldn't call it an investment, as you can't really "forget" your Emacs skills and get part of your money back. It's more like buying a tool. VSCode was free, or almost free. Emacs seems to cost way more.
bloopernova 5y ago
Emacs' feature of being a platform for Lisp is really something that needs to be restated again and again. You can do practically anything to text or other objects. If you can think of it, I'm pretty sure that Emacs can accomplish that for you. Any transform, file action, font changes, etc etc. Example, this auto-saves a given file. In this case, whenever I archive an org-mode subtree, the archive file is auto-saved: 435 │ ;; The `save-some-buffers` function can run silently, and it also accepts a 436 │ ;; function argument to predicate whether a buffer is saved or not. 437 │ ;; This predicate simply says "save the buffer's file if it's the notes archive 438 │ ;; file" 439 │ (defun redacted/save-notes-archive-file () 440 │ (interactive) 441 │ (save-some-buffers 'no-confirm (lambda () 442 │ (equal buffer-file-name 443 │ (expand-file-name redacted/notes-archive-file))))) 444 │ 445 │ ;; Finally, the newly-defined function can advise the archive function. So, 446 │ ;; after a subtree in org is archived, the archive file will be automatically saved. 447 │ (advice-add 'org-archive-subtree :after #'redacted/save-notes-archive-file)
- convolvatron 5y ago
  I really wish emacs had evolved a model for dealing with simple vector graphics. I know part of that falls on the market for not choosing a common model..but
  - phyrex 5y ago
    AFAIK it supports SVG rendering. Is that not enough or what did you have in mind?
  - cossatot 5y ago
    I agree completely. I made a big push to switch from vim to spacemacs so that I could use org-mode for note taking and reduce my dependence on paper notebooks, but the lack of ability to easily sketch really killed it. I'm a geologist so I need to sketch out maps and other kinds of figures that aren't just scatterplots and flowcharts or whatever (which can be done programmatically). If I could have something even quite crude it would be revolutionary, especially if the org clients were improved for iOS with better editing/syncing capabilities and less of a focus on agenda and calendar capabilities (todoist and native calendar apps work better for my job situation, personally). The rest of org is so easy and powerful... I still dream my little dreams but am not willing to learn how to implement something like that myself I guess.
searene 5y ago
My experience with Emacs is bittersweet. On the one hand, org-mode in Emacs is extremely powerful. I use it to schedule TODO items, organize my thoughts, write notes, publish websites, and lots of other things. On the other hand, Emacs drives me crazy from time to time. It's slow, hard to maintain, the environment I set up is fragile, and most of all, it lacks a modern UI. Scrolling pixel by pixel is still impossible in Emacs. Sometimes I do use VSCode as an alternative, but VSCode only has a rudimentary implementation of org-mode, and the so-called org-mode alternative - markdown - is not nearly as powerful as org-mode.
- User23 5y ago
  Does pixel-scroll-mode[1] not do what you want? It’s a built-in feature. [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/pixel-scroll.el http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/pixel-s...
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > pixel-scroll-mode was introduced at or before Emacs version 26.1. The third-party package "good-scroll" improves on pixel-scroll-mode by adding variable speed. IME, it's necessary in order to prevent flickering from pixel-scroll-mode. The defaults are somewhat conservative, and might not look like "scrolling pixel by pixel" to you, but you can definitely customize it to get what you want.
  - searene 5y ago
    Thanks. Actually I've tried both the built-in pixel-scroll-mode and good-scroll. None of them gives me the experience of a modern text-editor (e.g. VSCode).
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      Hmm. I honestly can't tell the difference between the behavior of good-scroll and VS Code (have them both open right now, on Windows). But there must be something that you notice that bugs you that I don't.
- 5y ago
bmj 5y ago
I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Two of those editors are Mac-only, and only one editor is open source. I suspect if Sublime had become open (and cross-platform), it would be significant "player" in the editor wars. Atom has mostly died on the vine, thanks to VS Code. That doesn't negate any of the author's points about Emacs, but, aside from VS Code (and, I guess, Atom), there have been few efforts to create a performant[0] cross-platform, IDE-like editor. [0] Insert comments about VS Code's performance here.
- bozhidar 5y ago
  That's a fair point, although I can think of examples in the IDE reals as well - e.g. in the world of Java Eclipse and NetBeans were popular (and open-source), but gradually IntelliJ IDEA dominated them for various reasons. I also remember all the Borland tools (super popular in the 90s) that have mostly disappeared by now. I definitely think that open-source projects are more likely to survive long-term, but it's not like they don't fail. Btw, I think TextMate is open-source these days as well.
agumonkey 5y ago
Every time I use a editor, I miss elisp freedom. Now other ones are programmable but a capable lisp in a dynamic env is still such a comfy spot to live in.
keymone 5y ago
i'm one of them traitors that switched to vscode from emacs. over time i just realized that i'm spending too much time coding the code editor, just can't stop, there's always something that isn't perfect, always some new approach or new extension, always a better way somebody else solves the same problem. got tired of playing catch-up. with emacs i have this mindset, that emacs can do literally anything and be perfect for my brain with enough tuning. with vscode i know it's limited and don't bother fixing it, just muscle-memory the workarounds. i do miss magit.
- rprospero 5y ago
  Would you have a little time to describe how you made that switch? I've worried multiple times that I'm too deeply immersed in the emacs ecosystem and have wanted to try branching out into a different editor to see what I might be missing. However, when I spent a month using vscode, it was just a month of lost productivity. I found the interface completely inscrutable and couldn't find any good explanations of how to think about vscode. As a concrete example, for the main project I work on, we usually configure via CMake and then build through Ninja. A simple `cmake` command followed by a `ninja -j4` was all I needed to get everything built. However, I could never get vscode to just do that. I saw that it had its own internal version of CMake (that could never find my shared libaries) and it had its own build system, but they usually failed to build (despite the code still building just fine on the command line). Every guide I found on vscode was about starting a new project from scratch and didn't touch on working with existing code. I know that the issue has to be how I'm thinking about vscode. That I'm not understanding its philosophy on how to work with code. What that philosophy is, though, I can't seem to find a good understanding of.
  - keymone 5y ago
    I’ll let somebody more experienced to chime in on cmake and organizing c++ project builds, but vscode has decent built in shell where you could just run the commands you need without leaving the ide. There’s way less philosophy to vscode than to emacs, i would suggest using it as dumb editor for a while and explore how various extensions make your life easier. If they don’t - maybe you just got your eMacs config right and should stick to it :)
andrewaylett 5y ago
One of the things I've found as I grow older is that I spend less and less time customising my environment, and learn to enjoy the defaults. I've never managed to get a proper dotfiles setup, despite trying, so moving between machines -- especially when they're not my machines -- means reestablishing all the settings I want to keep. I used to live inside Emacs -- not just for coding but for mail and news too. But nowadays I use Jetbrains IDEs for development and a reasonably clean vim for editing random files.
jmclnx 5y ago
Very nice, after your original article I started using Emacs more and more on my Linux Systems (I dabbled with it before). And in 99% of the time I prefer Emacs. On OpenBSD there is one nit, and googling only suggested 1 fix. I am a heavy RCS user, but Emacs RCS package fails on OpenBSD due to its Base RCS. The only fix I can find is to install GNU RCS and disable OpenBSD Base RCS. I tried to find and fix the Lisp package, but it is way beyond my skill level. OpenBSD people seems unconcerned about correcting their RCS to work with Emacs (maybe a security thing). I believe the same seems to be the case Emacs RCS people, I think they would prefer the use of GNU RCS (understandable). I would prefer to use OpenBSD Base RCS but I am caught between two projects. So on OpenBSD I stick with vim until I can find a workable solution.
trevorriles 5y ago
Magit is the thing that keeps my tied to emacs. No other tool gives me such a good experience interfacing with git.
tharne 5y ago
I like that the author hit on the curious and fun aspect of emacs. Whenever people talk about IDEs and editors, there's so much focus on things like efficiency, practicality, and return on investment. I don't use emacs because I did some cost-benefit analysis on my editor. I tried emacs and found that it's a whole lot of fun, which of course is why I got into programming in the first place - I found it, and still find it, fun. If you view programming as a job in the same way something like being a tax account is a job, then learning emacs is probably not for you, you're better off with something like VS Code that asks very little of its users and gives you a nice working environment right out of the box. Emacs is great if, as the author notes, you're an intellectually curious person who genuinely enjoys tinkering. If that's the case, you'll most likely have a lot of fun with emacs. It's very hard to describe how much fun it is to edit and modify your development environment in real time while you're working in that very same development environment.
lvass 5y ago
What makes Emacs unique to me doesn't have anything to do editing code. All the tools for doing that are incredibly similar, specially after LSP became a thing. Writing code in Emacs or VSC is practically the same for me, though I happen to prefer the former. It's mainly about how powerful plaintext is and how Emacs and it's community acknowledged that. Org and org-roam are extensions of my brain by now, I've even installed Emacs in my smartphone because of that. Ledger-mode is the most ideal finance management I could conceive, and I've set-up Emacs (CUA-mode with just a ledger hydra) for two family members so they could use it too. I have absolutely no idea how I could make Ledger tolerable to non-technical people without Emacs. I also create beautiful presentations in a couple of minutes using org-reveal. Besides, it's hack-ability certainly inspires inumerable beautiful creations. Some packages like Magit, Hydra, Helm and avy are just that, beautiful. When I don't feel like programming, I change some config and write programs as an excuse to test it, because Emacs is fun. It's no wonder people who act like understanding your editor is a chore have a bad experience, they're missing the point.
otterpro 5y ago
Author is none other than @bbatsov, who created Rubocop, Cider, Emacs Projectile, etc. I have huge respect and his work/contribution in open source definitely lends credibility for his writing, even if you may not agree with some of his opinion. As a side note, I've always wanted to get into emacs, even though I'm ok as a vimmer/vscode user.
prerok 5y ago
Is it still true that saving a file you are working on is Ctrl-x Ctrl-s? I am sorry but I will take vim's :w normal/insert/visual mode hell over this simplistic but cumbersome ergonomics issue any day. (disclaimer: happy vim user but always looking :) )
- martinflack 5y ago
  You'd rather hit 4 keys over 3? And use 2 hands instead of 1 (US keyboards)? shift semicolon w enter ctrl x s (Flaming in jest and good heartedness)
  - spijdar 5y ago
    I know this is (partially) a joke, but it does raise an interesting point to me (as a vi heathen), why does :w seem easier to remember than C-x C-s? I guess it's the modality, I know ':' indicates the start of an ex command, and "w"rite saves the file, while I only see C-x C-c as a "single token". I supposed it's just C-x for "execute command" and ... I'm not sure why it's control c, instead of just c, or s, or w...
    - philsnow 5y ago
      Just a nitpick, emacs is every bit as "modal" as vim. If you configured vim to start up in insertion mode and had to ^O to do every normal mode command, it would be somewhat close to Emacs's fundamental-mode. C-x enters a keymap called the `ctl-x-map`, lots of file-related commands live in there but also half a million other things. It's very similar to `:` to enter an ex command or, more accurately, `g` as a prefix to a million different vim commands. If you ever find yourself in emacs again, try typing C-x (to enter the `ctl-x-map`) and then hit C-h. This shows the help for the Ctrl-x keymap, and you'll see it's somewhat well-organized, if completely arbitrary. For instance, if you hit `C-x 5` you'll be in a sub-keymap (the ctl-x-5-map) which has a lot of frame-specific management mappings. Why is it under `5`? Historical reasons, no doubt, but it's inscrutable to normies like me.
      - 5y ago
bradjohansson 5y ago
My take on some of these comments as someone who has used Emacs almost exclusively for my day job for around 4 years: Emacs is not rock solid. It's easy to bring Emacs to a standstill with something as simple as a long string. This is especially apparent outside Linux, e.g. on Mac OS (Windows is a whole other story). It's a fundamental flaw in the text editor, and I don't know if there is any solution on the horizon. Text editing can also become noticeably slower once many of the must-have Emacs packages are in use. At the same time, becoming somewhat proficient at Emacs and knowing a thing or two about Emacs Lisp has made me a better programmer, and certainly more productive in the use of my editor. If Emacs can solve some of its performance issues, and perhaps make things like the Debug Adapter Protocol easier to set up, it will continue to be in a league of its own and an essential editor to many for the foreseeable future.

270 points by winkywooster 5y ago

When I meet quite practical devs that are into PHP or Java, they always recommend IntelliJ. Can anyone of that crowd that also have a solid understanding of Emacs do a short comparison between the two? I'd really appreciate it. Currently, I've only mustered enough courage and time to understand enough of vim to not feel scared of it anymore (vimtutor was the silver bullet for me there, learning enough vim in an hour to feel fine with it).

prohobo 5y ago
I think it's as simple as: Emacs is like VS Code, IntelliJ is like Visual Studio. JetBrains makes great IDEs, and you should use them if you're working on a large project that one of those IDEs is geared towards. It'd take a lot of work to get any other editor to have the same feature-set and organization of workspace. Emacs is a general-purpose environment for writing, and you should use it if you want a specific flow for writing code, or anything else. You can setup plugins so that it's like a mini IDE for most of the languages you write in, and you can setup plugins to modify the organization of your workspace. You want tabs? Add them. You want a tree view of your current project folder? Add one. You want Vim-style editing? Enable it. Etc. Right now it seems everyone is looking for a code editor that is extensible and fast - Emacs fits that bill better than VS Code (also Neovim might end up being even better!), but it's more difficult to get it right. That's why there are projects like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs to make adding/removing plugins easier, and also have a good setup out of the box.
r3n 5y ago
I use both for almost 10 years, here are my experiences: The main advantage of IntelliJ or any other IDE by JetBrains over Emacs, is that the out of box experience IDE provided, especially from a new programmer's perspective. All they need to do to click a button, check few checkbox, then IDE will resolve it for you and tell you what happened. But to make Emacs do any complex behaviors, you usually have to write additional codes or configurations to glue different features together. Not to mention you need to read documents and debug it when there is an error. In JetBrains IDEs those are integrated already. A context-aware error detection and code inspection is available the second you open the IDE first time. That is something default Emacs can never do. The main advantage on Emacs over IDEs, is that you can ask Emacs to do whatever you want as long as you know how to implement it. Practically speaking, you most likely will accumulate many little functions over time that is specific designed for your workflows. That kind of customizability is something IDEs cannot provide. I do not consider myself an Emacs power user, but I still benefit form it. Emacs is also have better text editing features in general. You can use the same features no matter what text file you are editing. That's why people want to use Emacs for everything. In short, they are different tools, use it where it is suitable for you. For me, I whine about how bad the editor is when I use IDE, then I complain about how bad the integration my Emacs has between multiple tools (mainly my inability to make it work). Hope this give you some ideas.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  Why would I need emacs for "complex behaviours" if I have <insert any programming language> installed on my computer? For example, I made a lot of scripts in Python to refactor codebases by automatically splitting files (including imports). Could I do that with emacs? Probably yes. But why? For most intents and purposes it doesn't matter if your "automated editing" environment is integrated in your editor.

rvieira 5y ago

Emacs is my personal little starship that helps me cruise the vast universe of computers :)

dang 5y ago

The earlier article, discussed at the time: Why Emacs? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256721 - Nov 2011 (128 comments)

bozhidar 5y ago
Thanks for sharing!

rackjack 5y ago

Org-mode is Emacs's "killer library" for me.

Phenix88be 5y ago
Also magit !
- tcmart14 5y ago
  Magit is what got me hooked. I just find it the best way to interface with git other than via the terminal.
- kdtsh 5y ago
  Absolutely. git at the command line works fine but I have always found it very dense, and prefer to use it only for very basic or very specific tasks. Magit makes all the usual things I do with git so easy. I have been using Emacs on Windows for a couple of years, but I have been transitioning to using Linux full-time at work, and by the end of the year I won't have to deal with the slowness of Magit (and git in general) under Windows.

michaericalribo 5y ago

> Beware - Emacs is highly addictive and it might easily consume years of your life! I agree with that wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong—I love emacs and I’ll be the first to talk your ear off about it. But it’s a hobby, and not necessarily worth the time investment compared with other editors, if you’re looking for something that “just works” and has all the modern features.

rich_sasha 5y ago
Agreed. I find myself struggling to recommend it to newcomers - it is just so esoteric to anyone used to ctrl+C for copy. But I can't imagine life without it. At my last job, I was forced to use PyCharm. Fine an IDE it probably is, I hated every second of it. Within 3 days I ditched it for Emacs.
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  > it is just so esoteric to anyone used to ctrl+C for copy Come on. „CUA mode“ exists since the 90s. ;)
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    I assume you're being sarcastic, but an Emacs beginner has no idea what 'CUA mode' is. Jokes aside, Emacs UX is just completely different to anything modern. Computer users not enlightened by Emacsen try to press Esc to get out of trouble, assume scrolling doesn't move the cursor, etc. Chorded keybindings are a mind-blow, and they have their own further pitfalls too. I either got used to Emacs behaviours, or find them superior (can't tell which one) but frankly I think they might be a big deterrent. For new users, it must be like getting into a car where all the controls are different. Brake and accelerator swapped, clutch is hand-operated (and woe to you if you've only driven automatic), stems are swapped, and some vital controls are operated by pressing buttons with the top of your head. Computer programs of the past 20 years have some basic common behaviours that are almost synonymous with basic IT skills, and Emacs diverges in many of them. I adopted Emacs in the relative modernity of 2012, when I joined a mostly-airgapped Linux environment and needed a power editor. I persevered and grew to love Emacs, but frankly if I could have downloaded VS Code or Pycharm, I probably would have done.

bradrn 5y ago

As a devoted Emacs user I think the following is really the most important part of the article: > Emacs is not really an editor either! I believe that Emacs is the ultimate editor building material. The out-of-the-box experience is kind of basic and somewhat weird, but I don’t think that anyone should be using Emacs like this. You take this simple foundation, you shape and mold it to your taste and preferences and you end up with the best possible editor for you and you alone. That’s the reason why you should consider using Emacs. … For me, personally, the ability to extend Emacs easily with Emacs Lisp remains its number one advantage over vim. There’s also the fact that you can re-create much of the vim experience with Emacs, but you’ll be hard pressed to re-create the Emacs experience in vim. For me, this is really the key attraction of Emacs. It’s not an editor; it’s a library for me to build my own ideal editor. And, in the long term, there are very few editors which can compete with this.

kqr 5y ago
For me, this is a bit similar to how Linux is not really an OS, it's a set of tools with which you can build your own ideal OS. This means everyone who likes "Linux" likes a different configuration.
lvncelot 5y ago
I'm currently in the process of moving from vim to emacs, and I've noticed that the only things from vim I really need are the modal editing and the basic keybindings - everything else, like the plugins I've come to love, are more or less interchangable, and from what I've seen, more than plentiful in emacs-land. I think comparing emacs to vim as "editors" creates a false dichotomy, one that has kept me from trying emacs for too long.
- Ketan-fullstack 5y ago
  Modal editing is what made me go back to vim after 2 months of wanting to like emacs. Even with EVIL mode it didn't feel just as smooth. Are there other ways to get modal editing in emacs?
  - 5y ago

Kessler83 5y ago

I find it doesn't really matter what I'm interested in (computer-wise)---Emacs has me covered. It saves a huge amount of time to not have to relearn a new IDE each time I need to switch programming language. There is always more about Emacs to explore, but it is well invested time, as I know that Emacs is going to be around most likely for the rest of my life-time. The killer features for me are: + Org-mode + SLIME (Common Lisp IDE) + A Lisp as "extension" language (it isn't really extension---Emacs is fundamentally reprogrammable). + Really smooth integration of LaTeX, Dot and Tikz. + Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. Also, I find that for me, Emacs has ergonomically good key-bindings once I accepted that they are different, learned them properly and did the CAPS-Ctrl switch.

yissp 5y ago
It seems a bit disingenuous to say "emacs can do everything" citing org, slime, and auctex, which are probably the three highest-quality extensions out there (maybe throw in magit too). In my experience this level of polish is not consistent, e.g. python or java support is much less robust. Emacs is indeed great for many things, but not everything.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  Java support is, unfortunately, iffy in every editor that isn't made by JetBrains. I've recently got Python working well. It can be done. The deeper problem - and this is admittedly ubiquitous in emacs - is that the defaults are awful, and there is not even good discoverable official documentation about what configuration you should use because everyone's just a wee bit too content to allow, "We have a very welcoming community on IRC!" to stand in for a proper new user experience.
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    > I've recently got Python working well I can't complain about Python except I didn't succeed in using the projects local pipenv automatically.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

DonHopkins 5y ago

>One thing hasn’t changed though - I still love Emacs and I’m quite passionate about it. As passionate in your love for Emacs as Kyle Machulis is? ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207607 https://github.com/qdot/deldo https://github.com/qdot/deldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

bborud 5y ago

What made me switch to VS Code (after using Emacs for 30+ years) was that I got tired of just how much of an easter egg hunt Emacs is for me now. Setting up Emacs reasonably for Go development just isn't even close to being straightforward. And with Go, go tooling and Emacs continually being changed, any setup that works will eventually stop working and you have to try to figure out how to rewrite your configuration. This happens often enough that even someone like me, who really, really didn't want to ditch emacs, eventually may do so. I appreciate all the work that has gone into Emacs, but the feeling I get is that the project lacks enough active developers and/or the focus misses the mark. I see version numbers going up - I don't see visible improvement. The goalposts moved. They are farther afield. Expectations of what an environment has to offer have gone up. If a decent developer experience isn't an understood priority, then Emacs isn't going to be very attractive for new developers. And it may have problems both attracting new users and developers and retaining new developers. (That being said: VS Code is apparently going through a rough patch where things have gotten really buggy if you use it for Go development. So it isn't like VS Code is a magic bullet)

throwawy6sgd32 5y ago
This is unbelievable to me who has been emacs user for this long. What i have seen so far is people whos customize heavily and use as a way of life or people who don't like after trying for some time and move away to other editors. There is another category of people who use for a specific purpose regularly(like org mode users) without making any customization or learning elisp. But your case is special. What is your level of mastery in emacs and elisp?
- bborud 5y ago
  I used to have a decent working knowledge of Emacs Lisp, but I wouldn't use words like "mastery". I could get stuff done. However, I haven't done any development in elisp for at least 15 years. Think of it has car ownership: I might have been interested in repairing my own car in the past, now I just want a car that does what it says on the tin and not have to futz around with it. I used to have a highly customized Emacs setup with a lot of code that would automate lots of tasks for different programming languages and environments. I essentially ended up using an email reader that I found somewhere and then rewrote to include a lot of automation of the way I did my email. Of course, things changed over time. My customizations started breaking - more and faster each year. I went from having my email delivered on a traditional mailbox file, to using IMAP. Along the way I had to use POP (because I could emulate having a mailbox file) the client needed a major rewrite to deal with IMAP and in the middle of the rewrite I gave up because something else broke. I have always worked on multiple machines, so I had to synchronize setups - sometimes between machines with different emacs versions. I used Emacs for fewer and fewer things until it was only used for writing code and markdown files. Heavily customizing anything is risky because at some point you become the sole maintainer of a lot of code. At one point I'd spend perhaps 2-3 days per month programming Emacs Lisp - which, at the time, was not all that great. I don't customize software I depend on that much anymore. Including keybindings. It is cheaper to try to learn defaults, and if you put your ego aside, usually not that big of a deal. This doesn't mean you can't add functionality or customize it - it just means you shouldn't have to rewire the innards to accomplish it. Sadly, in Emacs, "extensions" are, to put it mildly, a rough ride. And more so the more you customize. Things are a bit too "freeform". You end up saying no to a lot of things you could have had for free because things start to clash with your customizations. "You broke it, now you own it". I have a very clear benchmark for what might bring me back to Emacs: be able to set up Emacs from scratch in 10 minutes so that I can program in Go, have good language server support, easy access to documentation, and a lot of the things I used to have before, but which simply rotted away over the past few years. ....and then not have it break in a way that requires more than a couple of minutes of my attention for a year.

G3rn0ti 5y ago

> I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Emacs and vim are the only editors that stood the test of time This is the main reason I keep using Emacs for my everyday use. I never thought it was simply the best editor you could imagine. But it’s an editor I could always rely on. There have been so many editors and IDEs in the past with their shiny features, great UIs and everybody screaming of excitement — until they were replaced by the next new shiny editor after a couple of years. VSCode is surely a nice editor. (Although I don’t think its pixel dust UI is particularly great. And don’t get me started on its memory consumption.) Microsoft’s LSP, however, is a great idea. Emacs absorbed this feature already and will make it available even long after everybody stopped using VSCode within a couple of years. Editors fall out of fashion. People die. Emacs remains Emacs.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
VS code has been my standby for years but the number of times it wants to restart for updates drives me up a wall, and what do I get for allowing constant updates? A giant modal popup [0] asking if I trust a folder enough to let VSC run automated scripts. Yes it’s configurable but i value default setups so I can more easily wipe my OS without reconfiguring everything. I watched a video on JetBrains [1] and the keyboard shortcuts and navigation look genuinely well thought out, so I’ll be giving that a try (with a vim emulation plugin, naturally) [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/126310 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/126310 [1] https://youtu.be/x8y_6Gg28GI https://youtu.be/x8y_6Gg28GI
- noir_lord 5y ago
  I live in Intellij, it has it's own minor warts but it's a superpower compared to anything else I've used. It covers everything (code, inspections, docker, database layer, seamless multilanguage support).
  - ungamed 5y ago
    Except for -really- big projects, like the linux kernel. Its indexing is.. not fun.

Zababa 5y ago

> I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Emacs and vim are the only editors that stood the test of time, and I have a feeling they will be with us for decades to come. This means that an investment in them will be likely paying you dividends much longer than an investment in a newer editor or IDE. The thing the author seems to forget is that you don't need to "invest" anything to learn VSCode. I also wouldn't call it an investment, as you can't really "forget" your Emacs skills and get part of your money back. It's more like buying a tool. VSCode was free, or almost free. Emacs seems to cost way more.

bloopernova 5y ago

Emacs' feature of being a platform for Lisp is really something that needs to be restated again and again. You can do practically anything to text or other objects. If you can think of it, I'm pretty sure that Emacs can accomplish that for you. Any transform, file action, font changes, etc etc. Example, this auto-saves a given file. In this case, whenever I archive an org-mode subtree, the archive file is auto-saved: 435 │ ;; The `save-some-buffers` function can run silently, and it also accepts a 436 │ ;; function argument to predicate whether a buffer is saved or not. 437 │ ;; This predicate simply says "save the buffer's file if it's the notes archive 438 │ ;; file" 439 │ (defun redacted/save-notes-archive-file () 440 │ (interactive) 441 │ (save-some-buffers 'no-confirm (lambda () 442 │ (equal buffer-file-name 443 │ (expand-file-name redacted/notes-archive-file))))) 444 │ 445 │ ;; Finally, the newly-defined function can advise the archive function. So, 446 │ ;; after a subtree in org is archived, the archive file will be automatically saved. 447 │ (advice-add 'org-archive-subtree :after #'redacted/save-notes-archive-file)

convolvatron 5y ago
I really wish emacs had evolved a model for dealing with simple vector graphics. I know part of that falls on the market for not choosing a common model..but
- phyrex 5y ago
  AFAIK it supports SVG rendering. Is that not enough or what did you have in mind?
- cossatot 5y ago
  I agree completely. I made a big push to switch from vim to spacemacs so that I could use org-mode for note taking and reduce my dependence on paper notebooks, but the lack of ability to easily sketch really killed it. I'm a geologist so I need to sketch out maps and other kinds of figures that aren't just scatterplots and flowcharts or whatever (which can be done programmatically). If I could have something even quite crude it would be revolutionary, especially if the org clients were improved for iOS with better editing/syncing capabilities and less of a focus on agenda and calendar capabilities (todoist and native calendar apps work better for my job situation, personally). The rest of org is so easy and powerful... I still dream my little dreams but am not willing to learn how to implement something like that myself I guess.

searene 5y ago

My experience with Emacs is bittersweet. On the one hand, org-mode in Emacs is extremely powerful. I use it to schedule TODO items, organize my thoughts, write notes, publish websites, and lots of other things. On the other hand, Emacs drives me crazy from time to time. It's slow, hard to maintain, the environment I set up is fragile, and most of all, it lacks a modern UI. Scrolling pixel by pixel is still impossible in Emacs. Sometimes I do use VSCode as an alternative, but VSCode only has a rudimentary implementation of org-mode, and the so-called org-mode alternative - markdown - is not nearly as powerful as org-mode.

User23 5y ago
Does pixel-scroll-mode[1] not do what you want? It’s a built-in feature. [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/pixel-scroll.el http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/pixel-s...
NoGravitas 5y ago
> pixel-scroll-mode was introduced at or before Emacs version 26.1. The third-party package "good-scroll" improves on pixel-scroll-mode by adding variable speed. IME, it's necessary in order to prevent flickering from pixel-scroll-mode. The defaults are somewhat conservative, and might not look like "scrolling pixel by pixel" to you, but you can definitely customize it to get what you want.
- searene 5y ago
  Thanks. Actually I've tried both the built-in pixel-scroll-mode and good-scroll. None of them gives me the experience of a modern text-editor (e.g. VSCode).
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    Hmm. I honestly can't tell the difference between the behavior of good-scroll and VS Code (have them both open right now, on Windows). But there must be something that you notice that bugs you that I don't.
5y ago

bmj 5y ago

I’ve also seen plenty of new editors rise and fall in the past 20 years - Komodo, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, etc. Two of those editors are Mac-only, and only one editor is open source. I suspect if Sublime had become open (and cross-platform), it would be significant "player" in the editor wars. Atom has mostly died on the vine, thanks to VS Code. That doesn't negate any of the author's points about Emacs, but, aside from VS Code (and, I guess, Atom), there have been few efforts to create a performant[0] cross-platform, IDE-like editor. [0] Insert comments about VS Code's performance here.

bozhidar 5y ago
That's a fair point, although I can think of examples in the IDE reals as well - e.g. in the world of Java Eclipse and NetBeans were popular (and open-source), but gradually IntelliJ IDEA dominated them for various reasons. I also remember all the Borland tools (super popular in the 90s) that have mostly disappeared by now. I definitely think that open-source projects are more likely to survive long-term, but it's not like they don't fail. Btw, I think TextMate is open-source these days as well.

agumonkey 5y ago

Every time I use a editor, I miss elisp freedom. Now other ones are programmable but a capable lisp in a dynamic env is still such a comfy spot to live in.

keymone 5y ago

i'm one of them traitors that switched to vscode from emacs. over time i just realized that i'm spending too much time coding the code editor, just can't stop, there's always something that isn't perfect, always some new approach or new extension, always a better way somebody else solves the same problem. got tired of playing catch-up. with emacs i have this mindset, that emacs can do literally anything and be perfect for my brain with enough tuning. with vscode i know it's limited and don't bother fixing it, just muscle-memory the workarounds. i do miss magit.

rprospero 5y ago
Would you have a little time to describe how you made that switch? I've worried multiple times that I'm too deeply immersed in the emacs ecosystem and have wanted to try branching out into a different editor to see what I might be missing. However, when I spent a month using vscode, it was just a month of lost productivity. I found the interface completely inscrutable and couldn't find any good explanations of how to think about vscode. As a concrete example, for the main project I work on, we usually configure via CMake and then build through Ninja. A simple `cmake` command followed by a `ninja -j4` was all I needed to get everything built. However, I could never get vscode to just do that. I saw that it had its own internal version of CMake (that could never find my shared libaries) and it had its own build system, but they usually failed to build (despite the code still building just fine on the command line). Every guide I found on vscode was about starting a new project from scratch and didn't touch on working with existing code. I know that the issue has to be how I'm thinking about vscode. That I'm not understanding its philosophy on how to work with code. What that philosophy is, though, I can't seem to find a good understanding of.
- keymone 5y ago
  I’ll let somebody more experienced to chime in on cmake and organizing c++ project builds, but vscode has decent built in shell where you could just run the commands you need without leaving the ide. There’s way less philosophy to vscode than to emacs, i would suggest using it as dumb editor for a while and explore how various extensions make your life easier. If they don’t - maybe you just got your eMacs config right and should stick to it :)

andrewaylett 5y ago

One of the things I've found as I grow older is that I spend less and less time customising my environment, and learn to enjoy the defaults. I've never managed to get a proper dotfiles setup, despite trying, so moving between machines -- especially when they're not my machines -- means reestablishing all the settings I want to keep. I used to live inside Emacs -- not just for coding but for mail and news too. But nowadays I use Jetbrains IDEs for development and a reasonably clean vim for editing random files.

jmclnx 5y ago

Very nice, after your original article I started using Emacs more and more on my Linux Systems (I dabbled with it before). And in 99% of the time I prefer Emacs. On OpenBSD there is one nit, and googling only suggested 1 fix. I am a heavy RCS user, but Emacs RCS package fails on OpenBSD due to its Base RCS. The only fix I can find is to install GNU RCS and disable OpenBSD Base RCS. I tried to find and fix the Lisp package, but it is way beyond my skill level. OpenBSD people seems unconcerned about correcting their RCS to work with Emacs (maybe a security thing). I believe the same seems to be the case Emacs RCS people, I think they would prefer the use of GNU RCS (understandable). I would prefer to use OpenBSD Base RCS but I am caught between two projects. So on OpenBSD I stick with vim until I can find a workable solution.

trevorriles 5y ago

Magit is the thing that keeps my tied to emacs. No other tool gives me such a good experience interfacing with git.

tharne 5y ago

I like that the author hit on the curious and fun aspect of emacs. Whenever people talk about IDEs and editors, there's so much focus on things like efficiency, practicality, and return on investment. I don't use emacs because I did some cost-benefit analysis on my editor. I tried emacs and found that it's a whole lot of fun, which of course is why I got into programming in the first place - I found it, and still find it, fun. If you view programming as a job in the same way something like being a tax account is a job, then learning emacs is probably not for you, you're better off with something like VS Code that asks very little of its users and gives you a nice working environment right out of the box. Emacs is great if, as the author notes, you're an intellectually curious person who genuinely enjoys tinkering. If that's the case, you'll most likely have a lot of fun with emacs. It's very hard to describe how much fun it is to edit and modify your development environment in real time while you're working in that very same development environment.

lvass 5y ago

What makes Emacs unique to me doesn't have anything to do editing code. All the tools for doing that are incredibly similar, specially after LSP became a thing. Writing code in Emacs or VSC is practically the same for me, though I happen to prefer the former. It's mainly about how powerful plaintext is and how Emacs and it's community acknowledged that. Org and org-roam are extensions of my brain by now, I've even installed Emacs in my smartphone because of that. Ledger-mode is the most ideal finance management I could conceive, and I've set-up Emacs (CUA-mode with just a ledger hydra) for two family members so they could use it too. I have absolutely no idea how I could make Ledger tolerable to non-technical people without Emacs. I also create beautiful presentations in a couple of minutes using org-reveal. Besides, it's hack-ability certainly inspires inumerable beautiful creations. Some packages like Magit, Hydra, Helm and avy are just that, beautiful. When I don't feel like programming, I change some config and write programs as an excuse to test it, because Emacs is fun. It's no wonder people who act like understanding your editor is a chore have a bad experience, they're missing the point.

otterpro 5y ago

Author is none other than @bbatsov, who created Rubocop, Cider, Emacs Projectile, etc. I have huge respect and his work/contribution in open source definitely lends credibility for his writing, even if you may not agree with some of his opinion. As a side note, I've always wanted to get into emacs, even though I'm ok as a vimmer/vscode user.

prerok 5y ago

Is it still true that saving a file you are working on is Ctrl-x Ctrl-s? I am sorry but I will take vim's :w normal/insert/visual mode hell over this simplistic but cumbersome ergonomics issue any day. (disclaimer: happy vim user but always looking :) )

martinflack 5y ago
You'd rather hit 4 keys over 3? And use 2 hands instead of 1 (US keyboards)? shift semicolon w enter ctrl x s (Flaming in jest and good heartedness)
- spijdar 5y ago
  I know this is (partially) a joke, but it does raise an interesting point to me (as a vi heathen), why does :w seem easier to remember than C-x C-s? I guess it's the modality, I know ':' indicates the start of an ex command, and "w"rite saves the file, while I only see C-x C-c as a "single token". I supposed it's just C-x for "execute command" and ... I'm not sure why it's control c, instead of just c, or s, or w...
  - philsnow 5y ago
    Just a nitpick, emacs is every bit as "modal" as vim. If you configured vim to start up in insertion mode and had to ^O to do every normal mode command, it would be somewhat close to Emacs's fundamental-mode. C-x enters a keymap called the `ctl-x-map`, lots of file-related commands live in there but also half a million other things. It's very similar to `:` to enter an ex command or, more accurately, `g` as a prefix to a million different vim commands. If you ever find yourself in emacs again, try typing C-x (to enter the `ctl-x-map`) and then hit C-h. This shows the help for the Ctrl-x keymap, and you'll see it's somewhat well-organized, if completely arbitrary. For instance, if you hit `C-x 5` you'll be in a sub-keymap (the ctl-x-5-map) which has a lot of frame-specific management mappings. Why is it under `5`? Historical reasons, no doubt, but it's inscrutable to normies like me.
    - 5y ago

bradjohansson 5y ago

My take on some of these comments as someone who has used Emacs almost exclusively for my day job for around 4 years: Emacs is not rock solid. It's easy to bring Emacs to a standstill with something as simple as a long string. This is especially apparent outside Linux, e.g. on Mac OS (Windows is a whole other story). It's a fundamental flaw in the text editor, and I don't know if there is any solution on the horizon. Text editing can also become noticeably slower once many of the must-have Emacs packages are in use. At the same time, becoming somewhat proficient at Emacs and knowing a thing or two about Emacs Lisp has made me a better programmer, and certainly more productive in the use of my editor. If Emacs can solve some of its performance issues, and perhaps make things like the Debug Adapter Protocol easier to set up, it will continue to be in a league of its own and an essential editor to many for the foreseeable future.