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Back in Emacs's heyday, it was the editor everyone was complaining about for being too bloated and slow ("Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping"). Today, Emacs is

Back in Emacs's heyday, it was the editor everyone was complaining about for being too bloated and slow ("Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping"). Today, Emacs is a great retro video game, but you will be kneecapped if relying on it for serious programming work. For pay or otherwise. And if you're like me, you'll become mired in it and everything else will seem as a pebble in the shoe. Don't be like me. Using a modern IDE, or IDE-like editor, is a critical developer skill because that's where all the tooling and attention is. Focus on that and don't attempt to cosplay as an old-school wizard by faffing about with things like Emacs.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> Today, Emacs is a great retro video game, but you will be kneecapped if relying on it for serious programming work. I haven't felt like this was true since lsp support matured. Plus there are big benefits to having the same editor, autocompletion, etc while coding that I already use daily with org-roam.
- bitwize 4y ago
  LSP helps, but even with it Emacs is falling behind. Language hackers support Visual Studio Code first these days, with extensions that go beyond LSP.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > Language hackers support Visual Studio Code first these days, with extensions that go beyond LSP. Can you give me an example of one?
    - bitwize 4y ago
      Julia's VSCode extension provides linting, debugging, and live interactive development features that go beyond the language server: https://www.julia-vscode.org/ https://www.julia-vscode.org/
chimprich 4y ago
I don't agree with this at all. I think a modern, fully-tooled up Emacs is significantly more capable overall than e.g. VSCode. There's more configuration involved and Emacs lacks some features, but that goes both ways. Compared to my non-Emacs using colleagues I'm significantly faster at manipulating code. I don't think that's because I'm smarter or intrinsically faster (they're mostly younger, for a start). Emacs is just a lot more efficient once you've learnt all the tricks and built up a platform that suits your preferences.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

> Today, Emacs is a great retro video game, but you will be kneecapped if relying on it for serious programming work. I haven't felt like this was true since lsp support matured. Plus there are big benefits to having the same editor, autocompletion, etc while coding that I already use daily with org-roam.

bitwize 4y ago
LSP helps, but even with it Emacs is falling behind. Language hackers support Visual Studio Code first these days, with extensions that go beyond LSP.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > Language hackers support Visual Studio Code first these days, with extensions that go beyond LSP. Can you give me an example of one?
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Julia's VSCode extension provides linting, debugging, and live interactive development features that go beyond the language server: https://www.julia-vscode.org/ https://www.julia-vscode.org/

chimprich 4y ago

I don't agree with this at all. I think a modern, fully-tooled up Emacs is significantly more capable overall than e.g. VSCode. There's more configuration involved and Emacs lacks some features, but that goes both ways. Compared to my non-Emacs using colleagues I'm significantly faster at manipulating code. I don't think that's because I'm smarter or intrinsically faster (they're mostly younger, for a start). Emacs is just a lot more efficient once you've learnt all the tricks and built up a platform that suits your preferences.