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You also get the benefit of everyone else’s hard work with Emacs. One of the differences is that it’s such an established ecosystem, that instead of individual

by thom 4y ago

You also get the benefit of everyone else’s hard work with Emacs. One of the differences is that it’s such an established ecosystem, that instead of individual extensions just getting better, with Emacs they’ve yielded shared abstractions that make _new_ extensions trivial and much more consistent than with VSCode (which is nevertheless still an excellent editor these days). I also don’t understand why people think spending time on the tools they use to do work is wasted. You either believe software creates value or you don’t. If your time is so limited, eliminating toil seems essential.

Scuds 4y ago
I think my time is better spent improving my build and deployment environments instead of something like customizing my text editor. More of my work is in tying command line utilities together Maybe I don’t know what hardcore emacs use is like.
- thom 4y ago
  Yeah, I suspect the fundamental disconnect is that some people think of the terminal as the dev environment and something else is used purely as a text editor. Emacs edits text, but it’s an environment beyond that (one which happens to also contain a terminal).
adastra22 4y ago
I think you're missing the point. With vscode I literally don't have to do anything. It just magically gets better every time I start it up. Most people I know who use vim or emacs don't have it setup to auto-update extensions, and even if they did they wouldn't automatically fetch and configure those new extensions you mention. What I'm objecting to is the very idea of a highly customizable editor.
- thom 4y ago
  VSCode is a highly customisable editor.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > It just magically gets better every time I start it up. Some of my coworkers violently agree, but at least 20-30% get annoyed when autoupdate removes/ changes some feature (pane splitting recently I think) and they have to adapt their workflow.
oblio 4y ago
> If your time is so limited, eliminating toil seems essential. The counter point to this is usually: What exactly is your toil as a professional software developer (or associated profession) that is eliminated with a "better"[1] editor in 2023? Refactoring is more powerful with an IDE, for mainstream languages. For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in 2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-) Editing data dumps or whatever is probably better with an advanced editor (I generally use Vim for that). But it's such a rare occurrence. Writing code is super easy in an IDE. Most of my toil is unnecessary meetings, unnecessary reporting, unnecessary social stuff. Emacs can't help with any of that. * * * [1] To note, "better" is strictly a claim. I'm quite sure there's no peer reviewed study that can prove conclusively that Emacs/Vim users are more productive than non-Emacs/Vim users, just due to their usage of Emacs/Vim.
- quanticle 4y ago
  For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in 2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-) Are they? Multi-cursors, sure, but what other editors have a macro language that combines the power and accessbility of emacs lisp? The only other one that comes close is vim, and, as many critiques as I have of emacs lisp, I can firmly state: it's a lot nicer to use than vimscript. But other than emacs and vim, which other editors allow me to interactively automate portions of my editing workflow? All the other IDEs and editors that you've cited, like IntelliJ or VSCode require you to either find or write a package. That's a much bigger step than just interactively evaluating some lisp to do a one-off thing.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > but what other editors have a macro language that combines the power and accessbility of emacs lisp? Is it accessible? Why would I want to spend time learning the idiosyncrasies of a 40-year-old editor to write something that I might use once in a blue moon? I have other, more interesting things in life.
  - 4y ago

by thom 4y ago

Scuds 4y ago

I think my time is better spent improving my build and deployment environments instead of something like customizing my text editor. More of my work is in tying command line utilities together Maybe I don’t know what hardcore emacs use is like.

thom 4y ago
Yeah, I suspect the fundamental disconnect is that some people think of the terminal as the dev environment and something else is used purely as a text editor. Emacs edits text, but it’s an environment beyond that (one which happens to also contain a terminal).

adastra22 4y ago

I think you're missing the point. With vscode I literally don't have to do anything. It just magically gets better every time I start it up. Most people I know who use vim or emacs don't have it setup to auto-update extensions, and even if they did they wouldn't automatically fetch and configure those new extensions you mention. What I'm objecting to is the very idea of a highly customizable editor.

thom 4y ago
VSCode is a highly customisable editor.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> It just magically gets better every time I start it up. Some of my coworkers violently agree, but at least 20-30% get annoyed when autoupdate removes/ changes some feature (pane splitting recently I think) and they have to adapt their workflow.

oblio 4y ago

> If your time is so limited, eliminating toil seems essential. The counter point to this is usually: What exactly is your toil as a professional software developer (or associated profession) that is eliminated with a "better"[1] editor in 2023? Refactoring is more powerful with an IDE, for mainstream languages. For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in 2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-) Editing data dumps or whatever is probably better with an advanced editor (I generally use Vim for that). But it's such a rare occurrence. Writing code is super easy in an IDE. Most of my toil is unnecessary meetings, unnecessary reporting, unnecessary social stuff. Emacs can't help with any of that. * * * [1] To note, "better" is strictly a claim. I'm quite sure there's no peer reviewed study that can prove conclusively that Emacs/Vim users are more productive than non-Emacs/Vim users, just due to their usage of Emacs/Vim.

quanticle 4y ago
For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in 2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-) Are they? Multi-cursors, sure, but what other editors have a macro language that combines the power and accessbility of emacs lisp? The only other one that comes close is vim, and, as many critiques as I have of emacs lisp, I can firmly state: it's a lot nicer to use than vimscript. But other than emacs and vim, which other editors allow me to interactively automate portions of my editing workflow? All the other IDEs and editors that you've cited, like IntelliJ or VSCode require you to either find or write a package. That's a much bigger step than just interactively evaluating some lisp to do a one-off thing.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > but what other editors have a macro language that combines the power and accessbility of emacs lisp? Is it accessible? Why would I want to spend time learning the idiosyncrasies of a 40-year-old editor to write something that I might use once in a blue moon? I have other, more interesting things in life.
- 4y ago