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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 e

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.
    - rwilson4 5y ago
      Have you considered a .dir-locals.el file?
      - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
        That's actually how I ended up doing it. But not dynamically running `pipenv --venv` but hard-coding the path to the virtualenv, which I don't like :(
        bananaoomarang 5y ago
        In case it helps: I have struggled with a similar thing (poetry not pipenv, but should be applicable) and came to this working solution: https://github.com/bananaoomarang/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/.emacs#L271-L280 https://github.com/bananaoomarang/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs... Basically: if poetry project file exists in project root, get the path for the active venv with poetry and activate with the emacs pyvenv package. This adds a little jank when switching projects I haven't looked into ironing out yet but it is functional.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    Hi. I am absolutely a dyed-in-the-wool JetBrains "fanboi", but I need to counter this statement: <<Java support is, unfortunately, iffy in every editor that isn't made by JetBrains.>> Both Eclipse and NetBeans are outstanding (and free) Java IDEs. To be clear: I write this as someone who does not make extensive use of plug-ins with IntelliJ. I am almost exclusively using the default plug-ins provided by JetBrains. For many, many years, NetBeans was (enviably) considered the Gold Standard for Java Swing GUI design that was drag-and-drop. I knew developers who used NetBeans only for GUI design, then IntelliJ or Eclipse for other work! Finallly, I have never used Visual Studio Code, but I also assume -- at this point -- that it is very good with Java. The speed at which their community has grown is simply breathtaking. I am interested to hear from other people if this agree or disagree with me.
    - quanticle 5y ago
      >Finallly, I have never used Visual Studio Code, but I also assume -- at this point -- that it is very good with Java. The speed at which their community has grown is simply breathtaking. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I tried using VSCode with its Java development extension pack last week and I found that it was nowhere near as polished as, for example, its Python or Typescript extensions, both of which are gold standard. I ended up switching back to IntelliJ.
      - approxim8ion 5y ago
        This is my experience as well, VSCode has been excellent for TypeScript, but it is lacking a lot when it comes to Java. I'm much happier with Eclipse. I'm sure IntelliJ is great too but Eclipse works fine for me and I've never felt the need to drop it.
- rwilson4 5y ago
  I use elpy regularly for python development. Handles virtualenvs really well, makes it super easy to run one or all test cases. Good support for linting and reformatting (black). I should note that I don't work on large codebases. My codebases have ~20 files and <20,000 lines of code total. I know some folks prefer LSP and that might be the reason.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  It's been a few years since I developed in python. What kinds of limitations does emacs have for it?
captainmuon 5y ago
> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. The main reason why I don't like Emacs is that it feels very fragile to me. The first time I tried to use Emacs seriously - granted, that was many years ago and probably things have improved - I wanted to change the font because it was using an old X11 pixel font. So I went to the settings, and accidentially deleted the combobox that allows you to choose the font. I tried to configure it with the command line or REPL or what it is called and managed to mess it up even further. Later, as I got more familiar, I regularly managed to get it into a state that required restarting. It seems in Emacs, everything is a mode and everything is an editor, and there is no separation between content and UI (except for things like the menu bar, which uses a different toolkit and is bolted on). I've learned to appriciate less configurable editors because there is less to screw up, and you have the same good experience on any PC without your special config.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  > So I went to the settings, and accidentially deleted the combobox that allows you to choose the font. I'm genuinely curious how you did this, and how you did it in a way that was permanent. The customization screens are read-only by default (except for those boxes you type text in to specify the customization) and they're programmatically generated, not fixed.
- Kessler83 5y ago
  I mean rock solid as in being able to edit buffers with very different contents of half a million characters, every day for decades without crashing. I wouldn't call what you describe fragile. It sounds more like a typical learning experience. You did something, Emacs obeyed and then you who didn't like what you just did :). There is a market for restricting choice, so you are clearly not alone! But I don't think that the Emacs learning curve should be exaggerated, either. If you start it up and follow the instructions, you very quickly become productive. What gets people into trouble is usually when they expect Emacs to be like software X which they already know, so they don't read what's on the screen and kind of skip the introduction. And then they get frustrated when they find out that Emacs is Emacs. I'm not saying that's you, or that it is stupid, impatient etc. or whatever. I'm just saying that I've seen it quite a few times.
ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. That's actually not how I would describe Emacs. Not for Common Lisp either, Sly (and before that Slime) always had some glitches where I had to restart them or Emacs.
- Kessler83 5y ago
  Well, to each their own. I never have to restart Emacs. The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something. I'm sure I could avoid restarting SLIME, too---I just never bothered to learn if there is a way. BTW, all software that changes will have a bug from time to time, but Emacs and things related to Common Lisp are like at the very bottom of the trouble-frequency charts. I can't think of any software that I use regularly that gives me fewer problems. For the record I never encountered a bug in either (which doesn't mean they don't exist).
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    The problem with Emacs' configuration file is that it's processed in an additive way. Removing options and reloading the config does absolutely nothing. So in certain situations a restart is just inevitable. But aside from that Emacs, like most programs, has a UX philosophy that I can't stand. And while Emacs lets me change that I don't want to manually redefine things for every single filetype and mode I'm using. Vim just does it right unless I make the mistake of writing JS in HTML files.
    - Kessler83 5y ago
      Vim is a fantastic editor---no argument there! But you can always revert a configuration choice you made without restarting Emacs. Either use the built in configuration interface, or evaluate a form with the change. For example, if you set something to t you can reset it to nil and just C-x-e that form.
  - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
    >The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something. That's not something you shouldn't do and you also shouldn't need to restart Slime. Just break using `C-c C-c` and do a 'retry'.
tsimionescu 5y ago
> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. This is definitely not my experience. I regularly see emacs lock up indefinitely when asked to handle large buffers, especially when also using TRAMP. Even when it doesn't lock up indefinitely, it can easily stall for minutes(!) when doing something like moving point to the end of a large minified JS file (C-E). There are many reasons to love Emacs, and I use it as my main development OS almost, but stability and performance are not among those reasons. Note: mostly used it in console mode on Linux (Ubuntu WSL 2).
- Kessler83 5y ago
  Well, I guess we have different experiences then. That kind of thing hasn't happened to me in 25 years. Not once. The OS could matter, I guess. I didn't even think about that. I used Debian Stable and have been since the last century. Always a version or two behind, at least, so I guess bugs could be resolved before I get a chance to encounter them.
- rusk 5y ago
  I have experienced the same things but even so I would classify it as fairly rock solid overall. Under certain circumstances a rock can split. I see far more fragile, and unpredictable behaviour in other environments. It must be said that large file handling is an area that could do with some improvement - vlf-mode is okay as a workaround but it would be nice if I could deal with a large file in much the same way as a regular sized files. Few environments will provide this either though.
  - philsnow 5y ago
    > Few environments will provide this either though. I used vim for ~12 years and then emacs for ~12 years, and this emacs has never been able to handle large files well. vim meanwhile has zero trouble with files of any size that I've ever tried. "Vim can do it" doesn't counter you saying "few environments" though. I haven't needed to look much farther than vim/emacs.
    - rusk 5y ago
jimmyvalmer 5y ago
> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through [sic] at it. Try opening a large file. Or a small one. With emacs it's always a wait-and-see.
- Kessler83 5y ago
  You should probably tell Emacs users about it---they may not have noticed.
elwell 5y ago
I spend most of my time in Emacs (Clojure/Script), but if I'm writing JavaScript then VS Code works so much better. Maybe I haven't spent enough time tweaking Emacs for JS?

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.
  - rwilson4 5y ago
    Have you considered a .dir-locals.el file?
    - ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
      That's actually how I ended up doing it. But not dynamically running `pipenv --venv` but hard-coding the path to the virtualenv, which I don't like :(
      - bananaoomarang 5y ago
        In case it helps: I have struggled with a similar thing (poetry not pipenv, but should be applicable) and came to this working solution: https://github.com/bananaoomarang/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs/.emacs#L271-L280 https://github.com/bananaoomarang/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs... Basically: if poetry project file exists in project root, get the path for the active venv with poetry and activate with the emacs pyvenv package. This adds a little jank when switching projects I haven't looked into ironing out yet but it is functional.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  Hi. I am absolutely a dyed-in-the-wool JetBrains "fanboi", but I need to counter this statement: <<Java support is, unfortunately, iffy in every editor that isn't made by JetBrains.>> Both Eclipse and NetBeans are outstanding (and free) Java IDEs. To be clear: I write this as someone who does not make extensive use of plug-ins with IntelliJ. I am almost exclusively using the default plug-ins provided by JetBrains. For many, many years, NetBeans was (enviably) considered the Gold Standard for Java Swing GUI design that was drag-and-drop. I knew developers who used NetBeans only for GUI design, then IntelliJ or Eclipse for other work! Finallly, I have never used Visual Studio Code, but I also assume -- at this point -- that it is very good with Java. The speed at which their community has grown is simply breathtaking. I am interested to hear from other people if this agree or disagree with me.
  - quanticle 5y ago
    >Finallly, I have never used Visual Studio Code, but I also assume -- at this point -- that it is very good with Java. The speed at which their community has grown is simply breathtaking. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I tried using VSCode with its Java development extension pack last week and I found that it was nowhere near as polished as, for example, its Python or Typescript extensions, both of which are gold standard. I ended up switching back to IntelliJ.
    - approxim8ion 5y ago
      This is my experience as well, VSCode has been excellent for TypeScript, but it is lacking a lot when it comes to Java. I'm much happier with Eclipse. I'm sure IntelliJ is great too but Eclipse works fine for me and I've never felt the need to drop it.
rwilson4 5y ago
I use elpy regularly for python development. Handles virtualenvs really well, makes it super easy to run one or all test cases. Good support for linting and reformatting (black). I should note that I don't work on large codebases. My codebases have ~20 files and <20,000 lines of code total. I know some folks prefer LSP and that might be the reason.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
It's been a few years since I developed in python. What kinds of limitations does emacs have for it?

captainmuon 5y ago

> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. The main reason why I don't like Emacs is that it feels very fragile to me. The first time I tried to use Emacs seriously - granted, that was many years ago and probably things have improved - I wanted to change the font because it was using an old X11 pixel font. So I went to the settings, and accidentially deleted the combobox that allows you to choose the font. I tried to configure it with the command line or REPL or what it is called and managed to mess it up even further. Later, as I got more familiar, I regularly managed to get it into a state that required restarting. It seems in Emacs, everything is a mode and everything is an editor, and there is no separation between content and UI (except for things like the menu bar, which uses a different toolkit and is bolted on). I've learned to appriciate less configurable editors because there is less to screw up, and you have the same good experience on any PC without your special config.

Jtsummers 5y ago
> So I went to the settings, and accidentially deleted the combobox that allows you to choose the font. I'm genuinely curious how you did this, and how you did it in a way that was permanent. The customization screens are read-only by default (except for those boxes you type text in to specify the customization) and they're programmatically generated, not fixed.
Kessler83 5y ago
I mean rock solid as in being able to edit buffers with very different contents of half a million characters, every day for decades without crashing. I wouldn't call what you describe fragile. It sounds more like a typical learning experience. You did something, Emacs obeyed and then you who didn't like what you just did :). There is a market for restricting choice, so you are clearly not alone! But I don't think that the Emacs learning curve should be exaggerated, either. If you start it up and follow the instructions, you very quickly become productive. What gets people into trouble is usually when they expect Emacs to be like software X which they already know, so they don't read what's on the screen and kind of skip the introduction. And then they get frustrated when they find out that Emacs is Emacs. I'm not saying that's you, or that it is stupid, impatient etc. or whatever. I'm just saying that I've seen it quite a few times.

ReleaseCandidat 5y ago

> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. That's actually not how I would describe Emacs. Not for Common Lisp either, Sly (and before that Slime) always had some glitches where I had to restart them or Emacs.

Kessler83 5y ago
Well, to each their own. I never have to restart Emacs. The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something. I'm sure I could avoid restarting SLIME, too---I just never bothered to learn if there is a way. BTW, all software that changes will have a bug from time to time, but Emacs and things related to Common Lisp are like at the very bottom of the trouble-frequency charts. I can't think of any software that I use regularly that gives me fewer problems. For the record I never encountered a bug in either (which doesn't mean they don't exist).
- alpaca128 5y ago
  The problem with Emacs' configuration file is that it's processed in an additive way. Removing options and reloading the config does absolutely nothing. So in certain situations a restart is just inevitable. But aside from that Emacs, like most programs, has a UX philosophy that I can't stand. And while Emacs lets me change that I don't want to manually redefine things for every single filetype and mode I'm using. Vim just does it right unless I make the mistake of writing JS in HTML files.
  - Kessler83 5y ago
    Vim is a fantastic editor---no argument there! But you can always revert a configuration choice you made without restarting Emacs. Either use the built in configuration interface, or evaluate a form with the change. For example, if you set something to t you can reset it to nil and just C-x-e that form.
- ReleaseCandidat 5y ago
  >The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something. That's not something you shouldn't do and you also shouldn't need to restart Slime. Just break using `C-c C-c` and do a 'retry'.

tsimionescu 5y ago

> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it. This is definitely not my experience. I regularly see emacs lock up indefinitely when asked to handle large buffers, especially when also using TRAMP. Even when it doesn't lock up indefinitely, it can easily stall for minutes(!) when doing something like moving point to the end of a large minified JS file (C-E). There are many reasons to love Emacs, and I use it as my main development OS almost, but stability and performance are not among those reasons. Note: mostly used it in console mode on Linux (Ubuntu WSL 2).

Kessler83 5y ago
Well, I guess we have different experiences then. That kind of thing hasn't happened to me in 25 years. Not once. The OS could matter, I guess. I didn't even think about that. I used Debian Stable and have been since the last century. Always a version or two behind, at least, so I guess bugs could be resolved before I get a chance to encounter them.
rusk 5y ago
I have experienced the same things but even so I would classify it as fairly rock solid overall. Under certain circumstances a rock can split. I see far more fragile, and unpredictable behaviour in other environments. It must be said that large file handling is an area that could do with some improvement - vlf-mode is okay as a workaround but it would be nice if I could deal with a large file in much the same way as a regular sized files. Few environments will provide this either though.
- philsnow 5y ago
  > Few environments will provide this either though. I used vim for ~12 years and then emacs for ~12 years, and this emacs has never been able to handle large files well. vim meanwhile has zero trouble with files of any size that I've ever tried. "Vim can do it" doesn't counter you saying "few environments" though. I haven't needed to look much farther than vim/emacs.
  - rusk 5y ago

jimmyvalmer 5y ago

> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through [sic] at it. Try opening a large file. Or a small one. With emacs it's always a wait-and-see.

Kessler83 5y ago
You should probably tell Emacs users about it---they may not have noticed.

elwell 5y ago

I spend most of my time in Emacs (Clojure/Script), but if I'm writing JavaScript then VS Code works so much better. Maybe I haven't spent enough time tweaking Emacs for JS?