4 ms·

Oh I don’t know, the emacs ecosystem seems pretty healthy to me. The thing is that the “accessible” environments like VSCode are getting really good. Ten or tw

Oh I don’t know, the emacs ecosystem seems pretty healthy to me. The thing is that the “accessible” environments like VSCode are getting really good. Ten or twenty years ago you couldn’t really move serious code around fast without knowing vi or emacs (ideally both). emacs is still mandatory if you want to go crazy fast, but the people who reply “challenge accepted” always seem to find their way to it. I recommend getting crazy fast for a number of reasons (separate conversation), but it’s no longer obvious that the non-emacs/non-vi folks are handicapping themselves gratuitously.

seanw444 4y ago
For me, it's not even the "crazy fast" aspect that makes me love Emacs. It's the utter intuitiveness about the environment. Need info about a function and what it does? Short keybind away. Want to add a command/function without restarting the whole thing? Select it, and short keybind away, to load it. It just makes sense. And once you get used to it, it feels so much more smooth to operate on textual data than with something more "point-and-click, modern-user-friendly" like VS Code. Especially after you learn enough to know how you want to start customizing it to bend to your whim.
wiz21c 4y ago
About this crazy fast thing... Is it really possible to edit text that fast ? My experience is that I spend quite sometime thinking and just a bit of time typing. So in the end, I just basically use the CUA keys and a few other shortcuts and I've been using emacs like that for 10 years or so. But when I look at some emacs power users on YT, my feeling is that they type fast because they know shortcuts for every single kind of edit they want to make. Is memorizing dozens of shortcuts the way to be crazy fast ? OR is it something else ?

4 ms·

Oh I don’t know, the emacs ecosystem seems pretty healthy to me. The thing is that the “accessible” environments like VSCode are getting really good. Ten or tw

by benreesman 4y ago

seanw444 4y ago
For me, it's not even the "crazy fast" aspect that makes me love Emacs. It's the utter intuitiveness about the environment. Need info about a function and what it does? Short keybind away. Want to add a command/function without restarting the whole thing? Select it, and short keybind away, to load it. It just makes sense. And once you get used to it, it feels so much more smooth to operate on textual data than with something more "point-and-click, modern-user-friendly" like VS Code. Especially after you learn enough to know how you want to start customizing it to bend to your whim.
wiz21c 4y ago
About this crazy fast thing... Is it really possible to edit text that fast ? My experience is that I spend quite sometime thinking and just a bit of time typing. So in the end, I just basically use the CUA keys and a few other shortcuts and I've been using emacs like that for 10 years or so. But when I look at some emacs power users on YT, my feeling is that they type fast because they know shortcuts for every single kind of edit they want to make. Is memorizing dozens of shortcuts the way to be crazy fast ? OR is it something else ?