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> What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. You kinda can, these days. One of the main issues

> What both Emacs and Vim have in common is an intimidating learning curve. You can't just dip your toe in. You kinda can, these days. One of the main issues is that Emacs is, out of the box, the most complete toolbox you'll ever see, while at the same time being very incomplete. You have an email client, spreadsheet, unit converter, ASCII drawing, debugger, file explorer and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, you open a Python file and you are lacking a bunch of stuff that the likes of VSCode have out of the box. So the solution is to customize, and that takes an inordinate amount of time. Thankfully, some other people have solved this for us: https://www.spacemacs.org/ https://www.spacemacs.org/ Spacemacs has VI commands by default - and I don't mean just the simplest keybindings like some VI emulators do, it's using evil-mode and it's pretty good. It can also be used in 'holy' mode (Emacs keybindings). There's also(the one I use): https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs Either of these will get you a much more modern Emacs experience out of the box. You may need to add packages (it wouldn't be feasible to add all packages that everyone could possibly want), but they make it easy. Even though Emacs now comes with a package manager, it doesn't have any opinion on how you configure things. Both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are opinionated, and that's a good thing. Sure, you still need to learn concepts and keybindings. Thankfully, there's no shortage of tutorials, and Emacs own built-in documentation is very good. It also has a built-in tutorial, which is how I learned.

pdimitar 4y ago
Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. It became so bad I switched to a Doom derivative (CentaurEmacs) and while it did improve the speed, it merely reduced it from "almost impossible to work with" to "noticeably and annoyingly laggy fairly often". I gave up on Emacs after trying to make it work for a loooong time. Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now, and it's much easier to work with and configure, not to mention 99.9% of everything is instant (the only time it lagged was opening a source file of 1.7M size and I suspect the slowness came from the LSP server and not NeoVim itself). Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia from folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. A bit of a toxic statement, surely, but I'm pretty salty still and I haven't seen any objective evidence to make me look at Emacs and its fans more charitably. For anything and everything the answer always is "hack it for the 6328th time to make it even more your own!" No thanks. I actually have a job to do.
- lycopodiopsida 4y ago
  While I have big respect for neovim, it's performance on big files is actually worse than emacs. I've submitted a bug on that upstream - it gets stuck with disabled TS, LSP, highlighting where vim and emacs chew through without any issues. Emacs has its problems but is actually OK performance-wise, if you avoid the obvious (long lines) and less obvious (custom modelines, fancy pseudo-tabs, etc) pitfalls. Thing is, emacs is constantly improving - 28 is faster than 27, 29 will be again faster and solve the problem with long lines. > Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now Emacs has also a ton of stuff included, so that you could carefully and slowly make your way through emacs instead of jumping through distros and complaining. In the end, I am pretty sure that you will not be able to freely configure and alter and neovim distribution, such as LazyVim or AstroVim - they have a rather complex structure. > and it's much easier to work with and configure No, it is not - it has poor discoverability, you have to reload it on changing the config file. Configuring emacs is a breeze - you can eval blocks of code, check, eval again - until it sticks. Every function is can be called and inspected. Oh, and have you tried to debug your config code in lua? Tell me how it went. > Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia Emacs is carried by the fact that it is the only editor alive almost completely written and documented in it's extension language. > No thanks. I actually have a job to do. Of course you do - why else would you jump between emacs and neovim :)
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    Your snark doesn't make my Emacs run faster but if it makes you feel better, do continue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I switched editors because my job was suffering because of impossibly slow Emacs, not because I don't value my free time -- of which Emacs wasted plenty. Chose the lesser evil. Not a hard concept to grasp, I hope. Shame that you felt attacked and figured you have to be nasty but you helped with exactly zero of my concerns, in practical terms. NeoVim + LunarVim worked for me out of the box. The tweaks I did were entirely cosmetic. That's valuable. So far I spent exactly 5 minutes on functionality in it -- namely TS and LSP installs. Oh and if I have to debug my editor then the battle is lost anyway. Not sure why you put any value on that at all; if anything, it's a negative value.

pdimitar 4y ago

Spacemacs is slow as molasses on macOS and yes I have the latest Emacs. It became so bad I switched to a Doom derivative (CentaurEmacs) and while it did improve the speed, it merely reduced it from "almost impossible to work with" to "noticeably and annoyingly laggy fairly often". I gave up on Emacs after trying to make it work for a loooong time. Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now, and it's much easier to work with and configure, not to mention 99.9% of everything is instant (the only time it lagged was opening a source file of 1.7M size and I suspect the slowness came from the LSP server and not NeoVim itself). Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia from folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done. A bit of a toxic statement, surely, but I'm pretty salty still and I haven't seen any objective evidence to make me look at Emacs and its fans more charitably. For anything and everything the answer always is "hack it for the 6328th time to make it even more your own!" No thanks. I actually have a job to do.

lycopodiopsida 4y ago
While I have big respect for neovim, it's performance on big files is actually worse than emacs. I've submitted a bug on that upstream - it gets stuck with disabled TS, LSP, highlighting where vim and emacs chew through without any issues. Emacs has its problems but is actually OK performance-wise, if you avoid the obvious (long lines) and less obvious (custom modelines, fancy pseudo-tabs, etc) pitfalls. Thing is, emacs is constantly improving - 28 is faster than 27, 29 will be again faster and solve the problem with long lines. > Carefully and slowly making my way through NeoVim in the last 6 or so months now Emacs has also a ton of stuff included, so that you could carefully and slowly make your way through emacs instead of jumping through distros and complaining. In the end, I am pretty sure that you will not be able to freely configure and alter and neovim distribution, such as LazyVim or AstroVim - they have a rather complex structure. > and it's much easier to work with and configure No, it is not - it has poor discoverability, you have to reload it on changing the config file. Configuring emacs is a breeze - you can eval blocks of code, check, eval again - until it sticks. Every function is can be called and inspected. Oh, and have you tried to debug your config code in lua? Tell me how it went. > Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia Emacs is carried by the fact that it is the only editor alive almost completely written and documented in it's extension language. > No thanks. I actually have a job to do. Of course you do - why else would you jump between emacs and neovim :)
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Your snark doesn't make my Emacs run faster but if it makes you feel better, do continue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I switched editors because my job was suffering because of impossibly slow Emacs, not because I don't value my free time -- of which Emacs wasted plenty. Chose the lesser evil. Not a hard concept to grasp, I hope. Shame that you felt attacked and figured you have to be nasty but you helped with exactly zero of my concerns, in practical terms. NeoVim + LunarVim worked for me out of the box. The tweaks I did were entirely cosmetic. That's valuable. So far I spent exactly 5 minutes on functionality in it -- namely TS and LSP installs. Oh and if I have to debug my editor then the battle is lost anyway. Not sure why you put any value on that at all; if anything, it's a negative value.