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I used Emacs for 20 years, contributed to popular open source emacs projects, and am the maintainer of a couple of emacs packages with small numbers of users.

I used Emacs for 20 years, contributed to popular open source emacs projects, and am the maintainer of a couple of emacs packages with small numbers of users. It's wonderful and extremely powerful having everything in lisp; don't bother with emacs if you're not interested in writing lisp. One silly thing that I could never get to grips with is the way the minibuffer always seems to get stuck asking me a question, but the cursor isn't in the minibuffer. Or it's in some sort of recursive minibuffer mode. So many times I've just mashed C-g repeatedly in irritation! I stopped using Emacs last year in order to access the high quality LSP experiences that are available for Typescript and Rust and other languages in VSCode. I'm firly happy with the configurability of VSCode and generally fairly happy with the move. VSCode needs Emacs' window-configuration registers though.

BeetleB 5y ago
> don't bother with emacs if you're not interested in writing lisp. Strong disagree. I used Emacs as a power user heavily for about a decade with virtually no elisp knowledge (beyond simple conditionals and setting variables - I couldn't write a loop for example). Once I learned elisp ... it hasn't been a game changer. Sure, occasionally I tweak things the way I like it with custom elisp code, but there are enough config options and packages out there to do what I need without my having to write elisp code.
mplanchard 5y ago
FWIW lsp-mode does a great job of integrating with language servers in emacs. I and two of my coworkers use emacs with rust-analyzer, and it’s generally been a very positive experience.
nanna 5y ago
> One silly thing that I could never get to grips with is the way the minibuffer always seems to get stuck asking me a question, but the cursor isn't in the minibuffer. Or it's in some sort of recursive minibuffer mode. So many times I've just mashed C-g repeatedly in irritation! This happens to me all the time too! Anyone have a fix?
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  The thing you're looking for is `M-x top-level`. It exits all recursive editing levels and active minibuffers.
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    Thanks, that's perfect. I still have a running emacs instance for magit, and editing elisp at least, so I can still make use of your suggestion. (I made it so that C-g with prefix arg calls top-level; not sure if you'll think that UI makes sense).

BeetleB 5y ago

> don't bother with emacs if you're not interested in writing lisp. Strong disagree. I used Emacs as a power user heavily for about a decade with virtually no elisp knowledge (beyond simple conditionals and setting variables - I couldn't write a loop for example). Once I learned elisp ... it hasn't been a game changer. Sure, occasionally I tweak things the way I like it with custom elisp code, but there are enough config options and packages out there to do what I need without my having to write elisp code.

mplanchard 5y ago

FWIW lsp-mode does a great job of integrating with language servers in emacs. I and two of my coworkers use emacs with rust-analyzer, and it’s generally been a very positive experience.

nanna 5y ago

> One silly thing that I could never get to grips with is the way the minibuffer always seems to get stuck asking me a question, but the cursor isn't in the minibuffer. Or it's in some sort of recursive minibuffer mode. So many times I've just mashed C-g repeatedly in irritation! This happens to me all the time too! Anyone have a fix?

NoGravitas 5y ago
The thing you're looking for is `M-x top-level`. It exits all recursive editing levels and active minibuffers.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Thanks, that's perfect. I still have a running emacs instance for magit, and editing elisp at least, so I can still make use of your suggestion. (I made it so that C-g with prefix arg calls top-level; not sure if you'll think that UI makes sense).