14 ms·

I’ve been using emacs on and off for about 20 years and I don’t really get the fanaticism. Org mode and magit and all these things are cool. I like that you can

by gaze 5y ago

I’ve been using emacs on and off for about 20 years and I don’t really get the fanaticism. Org mode and magit and all these things are cool. I like that you can hack it. But — to me it never stops feeling like an ongoing project when you try to live your entire life in it. I like it obviously otherwise I wouldn’t still be using it, but it will never exactly feel elegant to me. More like a good text editor and a hundred other tools all duct taped together.

novocantico 5y ago
I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code almost exclusively now.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Yeah the LSP ecosystem is so much nicer than the machinations hacked into text editors over the last 20 years. When you get down to it a modern editor is just a process manager for language servers, a global event bus/RPC layer across them all, and a UI layer. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc.
  - Hedepig 5y ago
    I thought LSP was available for emacs?
    - bananamerica 5y ago
      It is.
  - _hl_ 5y ago
    Absolutely. Emacs is a great UX layer, only lacking a modern UI rendering layer. Would be nice to have emacs with a DOM-based rendering engine.
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      I'm not sure I love that idea, but I'm guessing that's the direction Nyxt is heading in.
  - novocantico 5y ago
    I mean I wholeheartedly agree but that nick
  - anthk 5y ago
    >. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc. That's ironic.
    - wiz21c 5y ago
      ironic ? it depends on the age of the author :-)
- antiframe 5y ago
  I feel that VSCode is missing the number one critical feature of Emacs: the ability to inspect and change the program as it's running.
  - trey-jones 5y ago
    And don't forget the number two critical feature: the ability to call yourself an Emacs user!
  - novocantico 5y ago
    Sure you can. Open up your VS Code extension in a VS Code window and live-debug it. I'd bet the process is probably very similar when editing VS Code yourself, but the point of the extension system is that you usually shouldn't have to.
    - antiframe 5y ago
      That's cool. The one thing I missed in VS Code when I last used it a few years ago was a link to the implementation in the documentation of each function. Maybe I will give it a try again someday. But honestly giving up Magit, org-mode, slime, and elpy will be hard.
      - novocantico 5y ago
        One pretty decent Magit alternative I found was lazygit. For a long time after quitting Magit/Emacs I just used git's CLI, but lazygit is pretty great.
- ghosty141 5y ago
  For me it doesnt even come close to it. Maybe if you wtite your own plugins but even then there are many limitations. The one-window problem for example. In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer) handles/styles headings. Its crazy! One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things work together. I have orderless installed for matching strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in VSCode you cant even get close to that. VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to „build your text editor“ cause thats what emacs basically is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to fit your exact needs with almost no limitations
  - jonpalmisc 5y ago
    The cohesion and interoperability of Emacs packages is hard to find elsewhere. When I tried Neovim recently, it was blatantly obvious and I was quickly turned off by how each plugin creates psuedo-TUI elements and prompts for input slightly differently.
    - ghosty141 5y ago
      Exactly, it's simply the difference between having a texteditor with plugins vs. having a "vm" that is mainly a text editor.
jonpalmisc 5y ago
I like to tinker and hack on things, so I enjoy maintaining my Emacs config to an extent. However, I draw the line at "text editor" with Emacs. I have no desire to read my email, paint pictures, or compose music inside Emacs—there are better tools for that.
- NateEag 5y ago
  I avoided email in emacs for a decade, using exactly this reasoning. A few years ago I got fed up with not being able to configure Mail.app to notify me of responses to "watched" threads but nothing else and thought "...I bet the CLI tools would make this achievable." So, I moved to mbsync for fetching email, not much for indexing the local email directory, and notmuch-mode / Emacs for reading and writing email. It's head and shoulders above any other email setup I've ever used. I wish I'd done it years ago.
- akho 5y ago
  I like having my email in Emacs, so i can reference it from org. I also like to write mails in Emacs. Triaging mails in notmuch-emacs is also quick and painless. Reading HTML mails, though — not so much.
- donio 5y ago
  For email I disagree. notmuch and mu4e are very good and being able to apply your normal text editing tools in a text oriented context like email is very useful. If there are better tools out there I haven't found them yet.
Barrin92 5y ago
> to me it never stops feeling like an ongoing project when you try to live your entire life in it. and that's the fascinating thing about it. What the OP called a 'living program' Smalltalk people called 'human-computer symbiosis'. Software as a fully transparent, introspective, organic thing you can directly interact with and change even as it runs. There's actually very few software like it, and if anything philosophically more and more software tends towards the static unix "one tool one job" mantra.
ljm 5y ago
I don't have the fanaticism either but I always fall back to emacs because it can quite easily assimilate the advances made in other editors without requiring too major changes to emacs itself. In fact, my config these days is basically vanilla emacs with some of the UI stripped away, the modus theme, and a few language-specific modes for syntax highlighting. I don't use evil or hydra or any such thing any more. The only thing I have a sticking point with is exec-path-from-shell messing with $PATH in my env because of how it works. I guess the reason it works well for me is because I try not to write code, so I don't need a massive toolkit that helps me write code as efficiently as possible. No-code is bug-free code, maximise the work not done, etc.
alyandon 5y ago
I forced myself to use emacs for about 6 months coming from IDEs and vi(m) to get past the "this is unfamiliar" stage. At the end of the day, it was a very nice text editor with a development environment embedded in it and the ability to tweak things to my work flows was certainly interesting. However, I never enjoyed the seemingly unintuitive default key bindings and I often found myself disappearing into rabbit holes and tweaking stuff just to make everything work more smoothly. Ultimately, I decided that was time I should have been spending on more productive pursuits. To this day though, I don't regret giving emacs a spin and I still swap caps lock and ctrl on all my systems. Remapping that key binding is helpful for so many things outside of emacs.

by gaze 5y ago

novocantico 5y ago

I used Emacs almost exclusively for half a decade and got pretty good at it. But I feel like VS Code is the natural evolution of all the great ideas of Emacs. So I use VS Code almost exclusively now.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
Yeah the LSP ecosystem is so much nicer than the machinations hacked into text editors over the last 20 years. When you get down to it a modern editor is just a process manager for language servers, a global event bus/RPC layer across them all, and a UI layer. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc.
- Hedepig 5y ago
  I thought LSP was available for emacs?
  - bananamerica 5y ago
    It is.
- _hl_ 5y ago
  Absolutely. Emacs is a great UX layer, only lacking a modern UI rendering layer. Would be nice to have emacs with a DOM-based rendering engine.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    I'm not sure I love that idea, but I'm guessing that's the direction Nyxt is heading in.
- novocantico 5y ago
  I mean I wholeheartedly agree but that nick
- anthk 5y ago
  >. Instead of reinventing bespoke versions of those things, just solidify it using standard protocols like JSON RPC, HTML for UI, etc. That's ironic.
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    ironic ? it depends on the age of the author :-)
antiframe 5y ago
I feel that VSCode is missing the number one critical feature of Emacs: the ability to inspect and change the program as it's running.
- trey-jones 5y ago
  And don't forget the number two critical feature: the ability to call yourself an Emacs user!
- novocantico 5y ago
  Sure you can. Open up your VS Code extension in a VS Code window and live-debug it. I'd bet the process is probably very similar when editing VS Code yourself, but the point of the extension system is that you usually shouldn't have to.
  - antiframe 5y ago
    That's cool. The one thing I missed in VS Code when I last used it a few years ago was a link to the implementation in the documentation of each function. Maybe I will give it a try again someday. But honestly giving up Magit, org-mode, slime, and elpy will be hard.
    - novocantico 5y ago
      One pretty decent Magit alternative I found was lazygit. For a long time after quitting Magit/Emacs I just used git's CLI, but lazygit is pretty great.
ghosty141 5y ago
For me it doesnt even come close to it. Maybe if you wtite your own plugins but even then there are many limitations. The one-window problem for example. In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer) handles/styles headings. Its crazy! One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things work together. I have orderless installed for matching strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in VSCode you cant even get close to that. VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to „build your text editor“ cause thats what emacs basically is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to fit your exact needs with almost no limitations
- jonpalmisc 5y ago
  The cohesion and interoperability of Emacs packages is hard to find elsewhere. When I tried Neovim recently, it was blatantly obvious and I was quickly turned off by how each plugin creates psuedo-TUI elements and prompts for input slightly differently.
  - ghosty141 5y ago
    Exactly, it's simply the difference between having a texteditor with plugins vs. having a "vm" that is mainly a text editor.

jonpalmisc 5y ago

I like to tinker and hack on things, so I enjoy maintaining my Emacs config to an extent. However, I draw the line at "text editor" with Emacs. I have no desire to read my email, paint pictures, or compose music inside Emacs—there are better tools for that.

NateEag 5y ago
I avoided email in emacs for a decade, using exactly this reasoning. A few years ago I got fed up with not being able to configure Mail.app to notify me of responses to "watched" threads but nothing else and thought "...I bet the CLI tools would make this achievable." So, I moved to mbsync for fetching email, not much for indexing the local email directory, and notmuch-mode / Emacs for reading and writing email. It's head and shoulders above any other email setup I've ever used. I wish I'd done it years ago.
akho 5y ago
I like having my email in Emacs, so i can reference it from org. I also like to write mails in Emacs. Triaging mails in notmuch-emacs is also quick and painless. Reading HTML mails, though — not so much.
donio 5y ago
For email I disagree. notmuch and mu4e are very good and being able to apply your normal text editing tools in a text oriented context like email is very useful. If there are better tools out there I haven't found them yet.

Barrin92 5y ago

> to me it never stops feeling like an ongoing project when you try to live your entire life in it. and that's the fascinating thing about it. What the OP called a 'living program' Smalltalk people called 'human-computer symbiosis'. Software as a fully transparent, introspective, organic thing you can directly interact with and change even as it runs. There's actually very few software like it, and if anything philosophically more and more software tends towards the static unix "one tool one job" mantra.

ljm 5y ago

I don't have the fanaticism either but I always fall back to emacs because it can quite easily assimilate the advances made in other editors without requiring too major changes to emacs itself. In fact, my config these days is basically vanilla emacs with some of the UI stripped away, the modus theme, and a few language-specific modes for syntax highlighting. I don't use evil or hydra or any such thing any more. The only thing I have a sticking point with is exec-path-from-shell messing with $PATH in my env because of how it works. I guess the reason it works well for me is because I try not to write code, so I don't need a massive toolkit that helps me write code as efficiently as possible. No-code is bug-free code, maximise the work not done, etc.

alyandon 5y ago

I forced myself to use emacs for about 6 months coming from IDEs and vi(m) to get past the "this is unfamiliar" stage. At the end of the day, it was a very nice text editor with a development environment embedded in it and the ability to tweak things to my work flows was certainly interesting. However, I never enjoyed the seemingly unintuitive default key bindings and I often found myself disappearing into rabbit holes and tweaking stuff just to make everything work more smoothly. Ultimately, I decided that was time I should have been spending on more productive pursuits. To this day though, I don't regret giving emacs a spin and I still swap caps lock and ctrl on all my systems. Remapping that key binding is helpful for so many things outside of emacs.