9 ms·

Is Emacs dying?

41 points by susam 3y ago

neonnoodle 3y ago
M-x betteridge-mode
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Indeed, one could repurpose the "No steep learning curves; Just buttons to push and a lot of bling to make it look really cool." argument to conclude that the truth value of (dyingp emacs) is equivalent to the truth value of (dyingp computer-science).
actionfromafar 3y ago
For “reasons” I compiled Emacs 29.2 on Windows XP last night.
Semitangent 3y ago
I think the corollary to this question pattern is always: "And if yes, who cares?" If the software in question is open source, the ones using it will still have enough access to it even if it were dying. The ones not using it don't want it anyway and chose one of the many other options.
- diamondap 3y ago
  > "And if yes, who cares?" One of my managers used to say that the only reason people write software is because there isn't already an emacs or Excel macro to do what they need.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  More diversity amongst editors is important. Given Microsoft’s track record of EEE, one wonders what they can do with vscode. Maybe one day it will only support GitHub, maybe code sharing gets picked up and is only available on vscode, forcing you to use it because everyone else. It’s never a good thing that Microsoft has majority market share.
diamondap 3y ago
After 25 years of coding primarily in emacs, I switched mainly to VS Code for larger, more complicated projects last year. I did it mainly because it eases navigation through large code bases and because the visual debugger is so easy to use. I still use emacs in the terminal for scripting and for smaller coding projects, for anything over SSH, and for blogging and fiction writing. It's a distraction-free editor that has very powerful features when you need them, but doesn't shove them in your face. It's also nice to be able to do everything with the keyboard and not have to keep reaching for the mouse.
- curt15 3y ago
  I use VSCode sometimes to click through a new codebase, but its memory consumption can be hard to swallow particularly when various LSP servers are running (looking at you terraform-ls).
  - pastage 3y ago
    I think web tools will replace this in time they are just so convenient, I have setup custom reference tools for code bases. These are simple to setup on a server or on you own desktop, but even with a seemingly perfect Nix install dependcies might fail.
    - bborud 3y ago
      I'm not so sure. Being able to run stuff locally is very convenient. That being said: try to press "." while you are looking at a project in Github.
- me_me_me 3y ago
  Same here, I came into massive project from embeded and driver dev where Vim with plugins was better for development. Instant start on everything that can run linux. Minimal hustle. However when you debug race conditions in app with 100s of threads in containerized environment, the limitations of cli starts to show. As with everything there is no silver bullets and its a good skill to be able to pick right tool for the right task
tezza 3y ago
vim, emacs are the editors you can use both on desktop and remote via ssh sessions. Then there is the individual preference between vim and emacs other tools like Eclipse and bash have emacs keybindings to repay the muscle memory investment
- FredPret 3y ago
  You can do the same with Intellij and VSCode
  - iLemming 3y ago
    There are many things that you can do in VSCode and IntelliJ or even Notepad. What most people miss or are completely oblivious to are the unique features of Emacs that are simply not possible anywhere else. Things like: - Hooks or advising functions, where you can override any built-in or third-party function. - Indirect buffers that allow you to view the same file through the lens of completely different contexts - imagine editing code comments as if you're writing Markdown. - Unrivaled keyboard macros that can be saved as Lisp functions, providing flexibility for more advanced macro behavior. - Integrated shells like Eshell where you can mix traditional shell commands with Lisp functions. - TRAMP (Transparent Remote Access, Multiple Protocols) to access remote systems via a multitude of protocols, including ssh/scp, ftp, rsh/rcp, smb, even Docker. It eases the work of editing files on remote machines or containers by making them appear as though they are local files. Emacs has some features that blow your mind and make you ask "But why?" and "Just how?". There's Calc that includes combinatorial functions, probability, statistics, and functions for number theory, conversion between hundreds of different units. There's a built-in Calendar that knows how to calculate Lunar phases and Sunset and Sunrise based on your location. Can your IDE change its theme based on the time of day? Sure, VSCode has an extension for it. But can you hook into that extension and make it append a comment to every Git commit using info based on a function of that extension? In Emacs, you can do that without having to write another extension. Don't say what other editors can do better than Emacs or just as good as Emacs. Because Emacs still makes it possible to do in an extremely hackable way that blows everything else out of the water in the hands of an experienced Emacs user.
FredPret 3y ago
From a linked post in the blog: > One of the things I have found throughout my career is that serious programmers pretty much stick to one of two (arguably three) editors: Emacs or Vi(m), and on OS X, TextMate. That says it all
- a1o 3y ago
  Lol for both the gatekeeping and TextMate (does anyone uses it still beyond authoring grammars?)
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    Gate keeping is very useful. We need more of it.
    - berkes 3y ago
      Why?
      - llm_trw 3y ago
        People keep complaining that software is getting worse every year, that quality is dropping and that it does less with more. Yet the simple solution of not letting in people who can't code a working sorting algorithm is seen as some type of crime against humanity.
        sherburt3 3y ago
        Yeah we should get rid of all the eggs so we can have more chickens.
        llm_trw 3y ago
        We shouldn't raise platypuses if we want chickens either.
        MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Zetobal 3y ago
If you trust old Usenet threads it's dying for at least 40 years.
CJefferson 3y ago
Emacs is certainly "dying" in the sense that I don't see any undergraduates using it. 20 years ago students were mostly split between vim and emacs. As time went by, both have dropped. Vim has picked up again in the last 8 years or so, helped by neovim, but I don't think I've seen an undergraduate (out of 100 students per year) using Emacs for about 5 years. My belief (from listening to students) is that vim using highly non-standard keys is seeing as a worth-while tradeoff for the extra editing power it provides. With emacs, it's not clear there is any advantage to emacs not using the standard ctrl+x,c,v,n,s,f, etc.
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  The power of emacs is not the default keybindings.
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    Which can be made CUA (ctrl-S, ctrl-C, ctrl-V, etc.) easily if one's on Windows...
  - pastage 3y ago
    The same has been said about VS code. I.e it is just a husk that you need to modify to something useful. This makes them useless to many. Sane defaults is important and should be there.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I don't know (or care) if Emacs is dying, but that is a point suggesting death is on the way. We have in Emacs an editor where the default keybindings aren't great (literally designed for keyboards that no longer exist). The configuration language is Elisp, which is not a great language (being a lisp is great, but by lisp standards it is eclipsed by Common lisp or Clojure depending on personal preferences). The overall feel of the editor with lots of extensions is a bit patchwork and unprofessional. The model of editing text is a relic from a time when multiple threads didn't exist and window managers were not yet a thing. I love Emacs to death and it isn't leaving my hands until they are cold and dead; but for the life of me I don't see why anyone should invest the time to learn Emacs. The greater programming community would be better off letting it die then rebuilding something similar with different defaults. All Emacs is good for is as a platform for building a completely different text editor out of extensions.
blagie 3y ago
In the nineties, emacs used to be the #1 text editor. On Unix. Which reached a tiny fraction of a percent of programmers. In that community, it felt overwhelmingly popular (competing with vi who was in a close second). Ironically, of the two, emacs was the user-friendly alternative. Today, Linux is the most popular operating system on the planet (if you don't believe me, count up those Android phones, network routers, and embedded devices). Even so, emacs runs on Windows and MacOS. That market is many orders of magnitude bigger. It has a tiny fraction of a percent penetration in the market of "devices with a CPU." So it feels very niche. There are no figures I'm aware of for number of users, but it's not at all clear to me how to compare: (tiny market) · (large percentage) versus (huge market) · (tiny percentage) Even as estimates. Qualitatively, it feels different. The level of "emacs community" has gone down, but "community" isn't about quantity, and can be reached with a dozen tight-nit users.
bheadmaster 3y ago
Emacs could be much more alive if it actually had good documentation. Leaning Vim is also painful, but compared to learning Emacs it's a breeze. I've tried learning both. I'm currently a Neovim user, and every now and then I revisit Emacs in hope of learning how to unlock its (alleged) powers. I give up every time because it is just too frustrating to even get to the point where I can smoothly edit a .c file.
- ssivark 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean by Emacs needing better documentation — IME it is exemplary of particularly good documentation + introspection, integrated well with the editor.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    Maybe it's too dry for todays culture. You can see numerous people asking for a specific way to communicate: clear single page of features, live tutorials etc I agree that emacs comes with almost all you need to understand it, but there's one inherent flaw: it's large. It's a joke in the community that nobody is immune to a late "wait, emacs can do that ? I've been using it for N decades and I had no idea.."
    - NeutralForest 3y ago
      Content discovery is somewhat hard, especially in the beginning when you don't know enough of the vocabulary and capabilities to easily find what you want. Ironically, it's at that time in your journey learning how Emacs works, that you need the discovering capabilities the most.
      - agumonkey 3y ago
        True. But there are a few paradoxes. Back in the days there was not a log to learn.. limited internet, basic html pages. I think people asking for too much is also backward. Good concepts don't come easy in a way. ... I guess there's a balance. One thing that I wondered is how to make the manual more lispy/repl oriented.
screenoridesagb 3y ago
I’ve worked as a web developer for over 10 years, eMacs is one of those things only strange people care about. Never really cared what text editor I use, seems really strange and time wasting.
- hasty_pudding 3y ago
  Amen! Ive used sublime, vscode, jetbrains stuff, and others. They've all worked just fine.
asb 3y ago
One source of stats is the 2023 Annual Rust Survey. The question on text editors allowed multiple responses (so percentages naturally don't add up to 100%), but 5.5% of respondents reported using Emacs for Rust vs ~30% for Vim/Neovim, vs ~61% for VS Code. I was shocked that Emacs and Vim weren't closer. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Survey-2023-results.html#what-ide-do-you-use https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve... Obviously, it's possible this is a quirk of the Rust community. Though the Go survey shows similarly small Emacs usage numbers https://go.dev/blog/survey2023-h2-results https://go.dev/blog/survey2023-h2-results (3% Emacs vs 16% Vim/Neovim).
- jebarker 3y ago
  > I was shocked that Emacs and Vim weren't closer. I don't really find this surprising. VS Code is just very easy to use and full featured without spending much time on configuration. It took me a while but I had to admit I was just making my life harder by using vim instead of vs code
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I read the quoted section as surprise that they aren’t closer to each other.
    - jebarker 3y ago
      Ah, my mistake, I think you're correct
    - asb 3y ago
      Yes that's what I meant. Just an assumption I'd had, perhaps the joking about Emacs vs Vim preference in programmers made me assume the groups were of similar size.
- hhh 3y ago
  Why would emacs be larger? It’s anecdotal, but I’ve gone thru my entire life (I’m 25) without ever seeing it installed on a machine I have used or mentioned in any of the learning materials, when I was younger I only heard it as a flame war topic.
bborud 3y ago
I really hope not. I used Emacs for roughly 30 years. During the last 20 or så of those years I would try to use Eclipse, IntelliJ and other IDEs for a few months every 2-3 years, but none of them stuck. The extra functionality they provided was nice, but as editors they just didn't work for me. A few years ago it was time to try an IDE again plus I had spent another full working day trying to get Emacs set up properly to program Go. I was really tired of my setup breaking all the time and that adding support for specific languages took so much time. So I tried Visual Studio Code. I'm not sure why, but for some reason, this time it stuck. I started using VSC for writing Go code. I also write a bit of C/C++, but even on VSC that's still a pain in the ass. More because C/C++ tooling never got cleaned up and the only thing it has really accomplished over the past two decades is for the tooling to grow less usable, more complex and more infuriating. Not even the relatively high quality of VSC extensions seems to be able to fix that. I find it really hard to articulate what needs doing to "fix" Emacs, but I think part of the problem is that there's so few people doing real work on maintaining and developing Emacs - and even less coordinated work on writing extensions for Emacs. Lars Magne is making a heroic effort to close bugs and get Emacs into shape, but there just doesn't seem to be a large enough community to coordinate and streamline support for various languages. It's a mess. I really hope Emacs does not die. I spent most of my professional career writing code in Emacs. I like Emacs. But it needs people who can evolve its support for various languages and it needs people who can do so in a more coordinated fashion. One thing I think Emacs could borrow from VSC is the concept of synchronizing configuration across machines. That's something that should really be built into Emacs and I think that it may be one of those things one could use to drive evolution because it would force maintainers of extensions to think about streamlining.
thelastparadise 3y ago
Personally I got sick of vs code with its heavy slow gui, spying, and not-fully-baked extensions which seem to never play well together. The language server was a nice idea but so long and thanks for all the fish.
RuggedPineapple 3y ago
This is going to be one of those things where everyone shouts and stuff so I'm just pre-emptively putting it out there that this is only my experience and I can only speak for myself. But in my entire life, now in my 40s, I have met exactly one person who used emacs enough that I knew/they told me. I don't really have a dog in the fight between vi and emacs. Back when editing your xf86.cfg was something you had to do fairly regularly to get your gui back after looking at it the wrong way or saying something that offended it I would use vi just because the barrier to 'typing some words and saving the file' is lower, but I have no great appreciation for it either. I feel like both are... suitable for the limited environment they had, useful in a pinch, but everyone much prefers using something more intuitive.
buster 3y ago
"I don’t have figures at hand but it’s my impression that Emacs development and the introduction of major new features has accelerated lately. Regardless, it’s clearly not the case that development has slowed or stalled." For such a post, it'd be much nicer to have some statistics. It does come around as a post by some heavy user preaching that everything is fine and well but that's just a subjective view from a bubble. How many commits did emacs have over the last ~10 years? How many updates and packages in ELPA l/MELPA over the last years? I find it hard to believe that development has not stagnated a bit in times of all the new editors and lots of young new developers not having touched a terminal and growing up on full fledged IDEs. I'm saying that as someone liking emacs (I do occasionally use it), but using sublime text and intellij most of my time. I find emacs an incredible piece of software and which for emacs to stay around!
- iLemming 3y ago
  One also has to consider other factors. Despite the evolution of the core of Emacs not being impressive and possibly even stagnating, it is remarkable how many external packages are available. GitHub alone hosts numerous Emacs Lisp packages, making it the largest body of Lisp code among various Lisp dialects, surpassing Clojure, Common Lisp, Racket, and others. Isn't that impressive? Can someone name a single scripting language used exclusively for configuring a specific editor that is as widely used as Emacs Lisp? Elisp is not a general use programming language; it's not very popular, even among Lisp-hackers; it's not even a great Lisp - it lacks tons of nice features other Lisp dialects had for decades. Yet it is undeniably, the most used Lisp of them all. How can anyone observe all of this and claim that Emacs is dying?
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >How can anyone observe all of this and claim that Emacs is dying? Because LISP is also dying. Compare JavaScript vs Emacs Lisp on Google Trends. It doesn't make sense to have an editor exclusively have it's own language instead of reusing a commonly existing one.
    - iLemming 3y ago
cue_the_strings 3y ago
I never knew how popular Emacs is before going into finance (which definitely tends to attract older programmers on average). I'd say it's more popular than Vim in my environment, which is surprising. It definitely has the air of the ultimate "erudite" text editor. I'll stick with (neo)vim, though, I don't see the time investment to learn Emacs and build up a config as worth it + neovim with Lua and LSP works just fine and is rather easy to configure.
- Avicebron 3y ago
  For what it's worth, setting up a language with the LSP is dead simple in a .emacs file, editing my config is something I enjoy a lot with emacs, make a change, M-x load-file .emacs, boom, face highlighting, autocomplete, pretty much everything and more, surprisingly it ran better than when I tried VScode
troupo 3y ago
[flagged]
- rednafi 3y ago
  [dead]
charcircuit 3y ago
Even if it's not dying no one there cares about the user experience so stagnation is inevitable. Just compare the out of box experience for both VSCode and Emacs and it is no surprise why VSCode is more popular. Take a simple feature like showing different files that are open in tabs. Emacs' solution to switching between buffers is harder to use if you want to go between different files you have open. How many years do you think it will take before Emacs has tabs for different files open by default? A ubiquitous feature of text editors. This is what leads people to think Emacs is dead. It's stuck in a design from decades ago and the project is unable to evolve. It is only able to slowly iterate upon itself.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  User experience is highly relative. To me magit is peak UX, above many many tools.. but to some it's utter sh8t and they want vscode (even though they are the one sweating and ranting everytime they get confused).
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    I agree that magit has relatively good UX compared to the rest of Emacs, but it is held back by Emacs' abhorrent performance. Magit however is not bundled with Emacs so I can not attribute its UX quality to the base Emacs editor. I do think of you did an actual user study you would find that it should be using more GUI elements to expose operations instead of keybindings
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      Except on windows I don't recall any performance issues that were not due to repo size. Magit is an extension of the old emacs outline mode, it inherits all the ergonomics culture around it (tab to fold, C-n/C-p for skipping, C-c C-c to validate..., k to kill). User studies don't apply here, it's too complex (due to the inheritance mentionned above). As I said, I have colleagues using other tools, they're slower and angrier, even with more buttons, which is somehow part of emacs culture.. don't create more widgets than necessary. And I'd argue it's irrelevant to good HCI for non mainstream duties.
rednafi 3y ago
I came to the game at the tail end of the Vim-vs-Emacs war. People pick up a particular editor not because it's always objectively better, but rather because it was the only available thing they liked at a certain point in time. Then, over the years, Newton’s first law takes over. Since I stepped into the industry only a few years ago, I didn’t see the appeal of spending so much time configuring a tool. So, neither Vim nor Emacs seemed like a sensible choice. I went with VSCode and forgot when was the last time I had to configure something. Now that we're seeing new editors like Zed making some splash, I'm exhibiting the same bias for VSCode that older programmers show for Vim or Emacs.
- hasty_pudding 3y ago
  Yeah I use nano if im remoted in and need to make a quick change and vscode the rest of thr time. My thinking is that if you need vim you actually need an ide or lightweight ide.
- iLemming 3y ago
  > People pick up a particular editor not because it's always objectively better, but rather because it was the only available thing they liked at a certain point in time. I've been programming for I dunno, over twenty years I think. I tried many different editors, tools, IDEs, specialized apps. I kept moving around. Started from Turbo Pascal and Borland tools on DOS, then continued using Borland Tools in Windows. Borland was fucking huge at that time, to the point (and I kid you not) that one of my college mates told me: "dude, I just learned that the first name of Pascal (the mathematician) was Blaise...I thought all this time that his name was Borland... That's how the company got its name, I thought..." I mean, he was not kidding, he seemed genuinely confused. Later I used Visual Studio (not VSCode). That was some almost absurdly heavy beast. It could die in the midst of compiling a project. The versions were so incompatible, often you couldn't even take a project created in one version of Studio and simply open it in the newer version. And so, often you'd have to have multiple instances of that thing open. Visual Studio had everything, including something called TFS (Team Foundation Server), that had tons of features for project management and some other crap, but for some reason most teams only used arguably the crappiest feature of TFS - the version control. It was quite some stupid shit and made me mad almost daily. When I discovered Git and learned it a bit, I stopped using stupid TFS, but I couldn't convince my team to switch, so I had to use a bridge to push my things to TFS. While I was learning Git, I accidentally stumbled upon Vim, and of course the first time seeing it I simply couldn't figure it out. I cursed out, and found a way to set a different editor as a default one. But shortly after, it made me thinking: "why would Git, such a clever and awesome tool choose to use this weird Vim-thing as a default editor?" I got intrigued and started learning Vim. After a month of hating myself, I suddenly realized that I no longer know how type in my editor like I used to. From that point on, whatever editor or IDE I would use, I invariably used with a vim-plugin. And If the tool didn't have one, I would just refuse using it. Then followed Sublime, Atom and finally Jetbrains products - WebStorm, Pycharm, RubyMine, IntelliJ Ultimate. I stayed with IntelliJ the longest - around seven years. I explored every single imaginable documented and not so-well documented feature of it. I had a huge poster on my wall of a printed cheatsheet. I discovered, reported, discussed and followed tons of bugs. Funny, sometimes, even now, I still get updates for things I filed back in 2012-2014. I felt like Andrey Vlasovskikh (at that time) maintainer of IdeaVim plugin had become my family. I loved IntelliJ. It was great. It had everything I wanted. If I ever felt the urge of thinking that I wanted something that it didn't have, I convinced myself to want less. For a relatively short period I had to use XCode, and OMG, compared to it, IntelliJ felt like a godsend. And one day, I took a flight from New York to San Francisco. My next-seat guy opened a laptop and started typing things in Emacs. I just couldn't help it. First, I pretended to be asleep and kept peeking. After forty minutes of that lame game, I simply couldn't hold it anymore and started asking questions. Until that point in my career, I haven't seen anyone coding like that guy - without googling things; without StackOverlfow; without constantly jumping between documentation, terminal console, utility apps, and the editor. It was all in one place. It was clean and strangely ascetic - no toolbars or menu, no icons, no progress bars, no multitude of numbers indicating different things. Another thing that fascinated me was how easily he manipulated window panes using only the keyboard. Clearly, he was "in the zone" - it seemed as if he had zero context switching. That was very different from how I wrote code and most of my colleagues as well. And he wasn't using some esoteric, little-known language. He was writing in Golang. I didn't know it then; still, it wasn't some completely alien thing to me. Yet some things I saw almost mesmerized me. That flight, though, wasn't enough to inspire me to try Emacs. Soon enough, I forgot about it. Three months later, I made a jump in my career. At my new job, there were a handful of Emacs users. I learned many new things from them (unrelated to Emacs). And that's when I installed Emacs on my machine for the first time. It still would take me another two years to transition. At some point, I realized that I have multiple things - IntelliJ, Vim, Emacs and Sublime (or Atom) open all the time, and I decided that I needed to start making cuts. My first fear was that I woudn't be able to vim as efficiently in Emacs as I used to. I was wrong. My second and major fear was that if I invest myself in learning Emacs, one day I inevitably find something that's not possible in Emacs, but still doable in IntelliJ and I would feel handicapped and would have to give up and move back and feel bitter for wasting my time. And once again, I proved to be wrong. Today, I cannot imagine doing any meaningful work without Emacs. From time to time I open AndroidStudio or VSCode and try to figure out some basic workflow there, but always move back to Emacs. It is hard to explain what makes Emacs such an irreplaceable tool for me - I'd have to write a book. But I do remember one of the first things that won me over. Search. Emacs has superior search I have not seen in any other tool. It offers too many different ways for searching things - locally, remotely, recursively, partially, contextually, dynamically, etc. With filtering the results and sifting through and editing at the same time. I dunno, I feel I pick Emacs over and over specifically because it is objectively better. For me. Someone else may have different opinion and their experience may not be the same, but I swear, no other editor or IDE makes me feel content. And not because I have little patience to learn new tools. I do very much like tinkering around my tools. And I do firmly believe that knowing my instrument well is not a part of my job. It is my job.
beshrkayali 3y ago
From my perspective Emacs is one of those pieces of software or technology that will never die. Just like RSS. But if you don't agree, and to quote the article: > I get so tired of that trope. Don’t like Emacs? I’m fine with that. Sorry you’re missing out, but fine. What I’m not fine with is people who don’t like Emacs and probably have never used it seriously declaring it a spent force.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Hugsun 3y ago
When I started using emacs around 10 years ago, it felt pretty stale and I had the impression that it hadn't been updated much in a long time. Now it feels like it's being very actively maintained. There are regularly new modern features being introduced. The fluid keyboard only interface (using doom emacs) is something I can't live without now. I have tried and failed to recreate the experience in VSCode.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  What is the fluid keyboard interface? Is this a combination of packages used by Doom or something bespoke?
  - Hugsun 3y ago
    It is mostly the nicely integrated defaults of doom emacs. Browsing files, code completion suggestions, code references and search results can mostly be achieved with the same convenient keyboard shortcuts, the exceptions are very frustrating. There are quite a few packages involved but they are mostly managed and configured by doom. The default keyboard bindings play a huge role in the fluidity as well.
rcarmo 3y ago
I used Emacs very intensely a long time ago (to the point of reading mail and pretty much living inside it across various kinds of terminals. Then I learned vim, and the sheer efficiency of it (yes, I know about evil mode, this was 20 years ago) and never looked back. It’s just everywhere (I can run vim on my iPad via a-Shell, for instance, and even find myself using it inside VS Code’s terminal window…) I returned to it last year somewhat, because of my constant tinkering with LISP, but these days I see no real point in using it when I have so many GUI options and a better terminal experience with vim.
BillyTheMage 3y ago
Interesting comments, mostly from people who have been around the block a few times. Personally I'm young and I just picked up Emacs a few years ago. I'm still unashamedly in the evangelical phase, wanting to share it with everyone I meet. It's literally a gift from all the good deities combined. But I can see why it's not more popular. You need to be a programmer to make it even halfway usable. That's its power and its curse. Personally I think GNU Emacs is a dead end. If Emacs is to live on it needs to be rewritten from the ground up in Common Lisp, it needs to be multithreaded, and it needs to have default keybinds that target the average computer user; us wizards can change them with ease. I think Lem looks quite promising.
globular-toast 3y ago
It was dying when I started using it 15 years ago and it's been dying the whole time and still is. Apparently. Meanwhile I've had 15 years with Emacs and those who haven't have no idea what they're missing out on. Sad, but hey, you can't do everything in life. The only Emacs users I've encountered in the wild were university professors who use Emacs pretty much out of the box. Never met another programmer who uses it. Plenty have seen me use it over the years and tried to pick it up, but don't think any have stuck with it like me. For me Emacs is like a bicycle. It's the pinnacle of its technology class. Sure there are more convenient things like cars and VS Code, but these always come with tradeoffs and seem unsustainable in the long run. Emacs is a text editor for life.
- iLemming 3y ago
  > 15 years ago and it's been dying the whole time and still is Exactly. Just like Latin has been 'dying' for nearly 2000 years, or since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. And while it's long been considered 'dead' language, it continues to influence modern languages and remains a subject of study and use today. Emacs in the same way just refuses to die. Lisp hackers keep improving it and building cool things.
iLemming 3y ago
Thinking of Emacs simply as "an editor" is a misunderstanding that obscures its true nature and power. At its core, Emacs is an environment for seamlessly integrating a wide variety of tasks—text editing, shell command execution, software development, document formatting, and even games. The key ingredient enabling this amalgamation of features is Lisp, and most people when trying to talk about, learn, or understand Emacs often miss that point entirely. Lisp is one of the oldest high-level PLs that is still very much in use today. Its longevity and vitality itself speaks volumes. While most computer languages are defined in terms of operations and structures specified in an arbitrarily chosen syntax, Lisp is fundamentally built on the simple structure of symbolic expressions. In other word, Lisp can be seen as 'the DNA' of programming languages. From a philosophical viewpoint, Lisp embodies the concept of recursion. Recursion, philosophically, is a pattern that self-replicates, a principle we see in nature in things such as fractals, the Fibonacci sequence, and the structure of galaxies. In other words, Lisp encapsulates the concept of "everything is a subset of itself", reflecting the fractal nature of reality. From a poetic point of view, Lisp is fluid, expressive and malleable. It allows metaprogramming, where programs can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify themselves while running. This can lead to more concise, productive, and higher-level coding. In a sense, this reflects the poetic concepts of reflexivity, versatility and continuous evolution. Lisp is famed for embodying the essence of simplicity. It's the epitome of elegance expressed through minimalism. Its design philosophy espouses the principle of composing complex operations from a smaller set of primitives. As T.S. Eliot once said, “When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas.” The survival of Emacs is tied to the survival of Lisp, and Lisp is far from being obsolete. Its concepts are deep-seated in the world of programming and have shaped many modern languages. Just as Latin continues to live and breathe through its daughter languages and its impact across sciences, Lisp continues to pervade the technological universe due to its profound and timeless concepts. Learn some Lisp, and maybe you'll realize what makes Emacs such a powerful, incredible, and extensible tool and why it is timeless.
maxace 3y ago
> Being backed by microsoft means its always going to be better. my eyebrows launched off of my face
lycopodiopsida 3y ago
Emacs is not dying, but I don't know if it is well. I feel that for non-lisp developers it is only the last choice. Ecosystem is split between eglot and LSP, so you have to choose between debugger availability and performance for many languages. You have to do a lot of work to stop emacs opening buffers left and right on every occasion. Load times and micro-stutters make it a hard sell. Some amazing work was done in last years with jit compilation, but also some, imo bad decisions were done with the way treesitter was introduced. I love the introspection and self-documentation of emacs, but I just cannot justify using it after neovim, which is very sleek with telescope and mason, easier to configure, fast and just aesthetically more pleasant, to be honest. Maybe if I would not need editors for programming, I would be more interested in org-mode, but on itself it is not enough to keep me in emacs.

Is Emacs dying?

41 points by susam 3y ago

neonnoodle 3y ago

M-x betteridge-mode

082349872349872 3y ago
Indeed, one could repurpose the "No steep learning curves; Just buttons to push and a lot of bling to make it look really cool." argument to conclude that the truth value of (dyingp emacs) is equivalent to the truth value of (dyingp computer-science).

actionfromafar 3y ago

For “reasons” I compiled Emacs 29.2 on Windows XP last night.

Semitangent 3y ago

I think the corollary to this question pattern is always: "And if yes, who cares?" If the software in question is open source, the ones using it will still have enough access to it even if it were dying. The ones not using it don't want it anyway and chose one of the many other options.

diamondap 3y ago
> "And if yes, who cares?" One of my managers used to say that the only reason people write software is because there isn't already an emacs or Excel macro to do what they need.
myaccountonhn 3y ago
More diversity amongst editors is important. Given Microsoft’s track record of EEE, one wonders what they can do with vscode. Maybe one day it will only support GitHub, maybe code sharing gets picked up and is only available on vscode, forcing you to use it because everyone else. It’s never a good thing that Microsoft has majority market share.

diamondap 3y ago

After 25 years of coding primarily in emacs, I switched mainly to VS Code for larger, more complicated projects last year. I did it mainly because it eases navigation through large code bases and because the visual debugger is so easy to use. I still use emacs in the terminal for scripting and for smaller coding projects, for anything over SSH, and for blogging and fiction writing. It's a distraction-free editor that has very powerful features when you need them, but doesn't shove them in your face. It's also nice to be able to do everything with the keyboard and not have to keep reaching for the mouse.

curt15 3y ago
I use VSCode sometimes to click through a new codebase, but its memory consumption can be hard to swallow particularly when various LSP servers are running (looking at you terraform-ls).
- pastage 3y ago
  I think web tools will replace this in time they are just so convenient, I have setup custom reference tools for code bases. These are simple to setup on a server or on you own desktop, but even with a seemingly perfect Nix install dependcies might fail.
  - bborud 3y ago
    I'm not so sure. Being able to run stuff locally is very convenient. That being said: try to press "." while you are looking at a project in Github.
me_me_me 3y ago
Same here, I came into massive project from embeded and driver dev where Vim with plugins was better for development. Instant start on everything that can run linux. Minimal hustle. However when you debug race conditions in app with 100s of threads in containerized environment, the limitations of cli starts to show. As with everything there is no silver bullets and its a good skill to be able to pick right tool for the right task

tezza 3y ago

vim, emacs are the editors you can use both on desktop and remote via ssh sessions. Then there is the individual preference between vim and emacs other tools like Eclipse and bash have emacs keybindings to repay the muscle memory investment

FredPret 3y ago
You can do the same with Intellij and VSCode
- iLemming 3y ago
  There are many things that you can do in VSCode and IntelliJ or even Notepad. What most people miss or are completely oblivious to are the unique features of Emacs that are simply not possible anywhere else. Things like: - Hooks or advising functions, where you can override any built-in or third-party function. - Indirect buffers that allow you to view the same file through the lens of completely different contexts - imagine editing code comments as if you're writing Markdown. - Unrivaled keyboard macros that can be saved as Lisp functions, providing flexibility for more advanced macro behavior. - Integrated shells like Eshell where you can mix traditional shell commands with Lisp functions. - TRAMP (Transparent Remote Access, Multiple Protocols) to access remote systems via a multitude of protocols, including ssh/scp, ftp, rsh/rcp, smb, even Docker. It eases the work of editing files on remote machines or containers by making them appear as though they are local files. Emacs has some features that blow your mind and make you ask "But why?" and "Just how?". There's Calc that includes combinatorial functions, probability, statistics, and functions for number theory, conversion between hundreds of different units. There's a built-in Calendar that knows how to calculate Lunar phases and Sunset and Sunrise based on your location. Can your IDE change its theme based on the time of day? Sure, VSCode has an extension for it. But can you hook into that extension and make it append a comment to every Git commit using info based on a function of that extension? In Emacs, you can do that without having to write another extension. Don't say what other editors can do better than Emacs or just as good as Emacs. Because Emacs still makes it possible to do in an extremely hackable way that blows everything else out of the water in the hands of an experienced Emacs user.

FredPret 3y ago

From a linked post in the blog: > One of the things I have found throughout my career is that serious programmers pretty much stick to one of two (arguably three) editors: Emacs or Vi(m), and on OS X, TextMate. That says it all

a1o 3y ago
Lol for both the gatekeeping and TextMate (does anyone uses it still beyond authoring grammars?)
- llm_trw 3y ago
  Gate keeping is very useful. We need more of it.
  - berkes 3y ago
    Why?
    - llm_trw 3y ago
      People keep complaining that software is getting worse every year, that quality is dropping and that it does less with more. Yet the simple solution of not letting in people who can't code a working sorting algorithm is seen as some type of crime against humanity.
      - sherburt3 3y ago
        Yeah we should get rid of all the eggs so we can have more chickens.
        llm_trw 3y ago
        We shouldn't raise platypuses if we want chickens either.
      - MattPalmer1086 3y ago

Zetobal 3y ago

If you trust old Usenet threads it's dying for at least 40 years.

CJefferson 3y ago

Emacs is certainly "dying" in the sense that I don't see any undergraduates using it. 20 years ago students were mostly split between vim and emacs. As time went by, both have dropped. Vim has picked up again in the last 8 years or so, helped by neovim, but I don't think I've seen an undergraduate (out of 100 students per year) using Emacs for about 5 years. My belief (from listening to students) is that vim using highly non-standard keys is seeing as a worth-while tradeoff for the extra editing power it provides. With emacs, it's not clear there is any advantage to emacs not using the standard ctrl+x,c,v,n,s,f, etc.

thelastparadise 3y ago
The power of emacs is not the default keybindings.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  Which can be made CUA (ctrl-S, ctrl-C, ctrl-V, etc.) easily if one's on Windows...
- pastage 3y ago
  The same has been said about VS code. I.e it is just a husk that you need to modify to something useful. This makes them useless to many. Sane defaults is important and should be there.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I don't know (or care) if Emacs is dying, but that is a point suggesting death is on the way. We have in Emacs an editor where the default keybindings aren't great (literally designed for keyboards that no longer exist). The configuration language is Elisp, which is not a great language (being a lisp is great, but by lisp standards it is eclipsed by Common lisp or Clojure depending on personal preferences). The overall feel of the editor with lots of extensions is a bit patchwork and unprofessional. The model of editing text is a relic from a time when multiple threads didn't exist and window managers were not yet a thing. I love Emacs to death and it isn't leaving my hands until they are cold and dead; but for the life of me I don't see why anyone should invest the time to learn Emacs. The greater programming community would be better off letting it die then rebuilding something similar with different defaults. All Emacs is good for is as a platform for building a completely different text editor out of extensions.

blagie 3y ago

In the nineties, emacs used to be the #1 text editor. On Unix. Which reached a tiny fraction of a percent of programmers. In that community, it felt overwhelmingly popular (competing with vi who was in a close second). Ironically, of the two, emacs was the user-friendly alternative. Today, Linux is the most popular operating system on the planet (if you don't believe me, count up those Android phones, network routers, and embedded devices). Even so, emacs runs on Windows and MacOS. That market is many orders of magnitude bigger. It has a tiny fraction of a percent penetration in the market of "devices with a CPU." So it feels very niche. There are no figures I'm aware of for number of users, but it's not at all clear to me how to compare: (tiny market) · (large percentage) versus (huge market) · (tiny percentage) Even as estimates. Qualitatively, it feels different. The level of "emacs community" has gone down, but "community" isn't about quantity, and can be reached with a dozen tight-nit users.

bheadmaster 3y ago

Emacs could be much more alive if it actually had good documentation. Leaning Vim is also painful, but compared to learning Emacs it's a breeze. I've tried learning both. I'm currently a Neovim user, and every now and then I revisit Emacs in hope of learning how to unlock its (alleged) powers. I give up every time because it is just too frustrating to even get to the point where I can smoothly edit a .c file.

ssivark 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by Emacs needing better documentation — IME it is exemplary of particularly good documentation + introspection, integrated well with the editor.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  Maybe it's too dry for todays culture. You can see numerous people asking for a specific way to communicate: clear single page of features, live tutorials etc I agree that emacs comes with almost all you need to understand it, but there's one inherent flaw: it's large. It's a joke in the community that nobody is immune to a late "wait, emacs can do that ? I've been using it for N decades and I had no idea.."
  - NeutralForest 3y ago
    Content discovery is somewhat hard, especially in the beginning when you don't know enough of the vocabulary and capabilities to easily find what you want. Ironically, it's at that time in your journey learning how Emacs works, that you need the discovering capabilities the most.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      True. But there are a few paradoxes. Back in the days there was not a log to learn.. limited internet, basic html pages. I think people asking for too much is also backward. Good concepts don't come easy in a way. ... I guess there's a balance. One thing that I wondered is how to make the manual more lispy/repl oriented.

screenoridesagb 3y ago

I’ve worked as a web developer for over 10 years, eMacs is one of those things only strange people care about. Never really cared what text editor I use, seems really strange and time wasting.

hasty_pudding 3y ago
Amen! Ive used sublime, vscode, jetbrains stuff, and others. They've all worked just fine.

asb 3y ago

One source of stats is the 2023 Annual Rust Survey. The question on text editors allowed multiple responses (so percentages naturally don't add up to 100%), but 5.5% of respondents reported using Emacs for Rust vs ~30% for Vim/Neovim, vs ~61% for VS Code. I was shocked that Emacs and Vim weren't closer. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Survey-2023-results.html#what-ide-do-you-use https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve... Obviously, it's possible this is a quirk of the Rust community. Though the Go survey shows similarly small Emacs usage numbers https://go.dev/blog/survey2023-h2-results https://go.dev/blog/survey2023-h2-results (3% Emacs vs 16% Vim/Neovim).

jebarker 3y ago
> I was shocked that Emacs and Vim weren't closer. I don't really find this surprising. VS Code is just very easy to use and full featured without spending much time on configuration. It took me a while but I had to admit I was just making my life harder by using vim instead of vs code
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I read the quoted section as surprise that they aren’t closer to each other.
  - jebarker 3y ago
    Ah, my mistake, I think you're correct
  - asb 3y ago
    Yes that's what I meant. Just an assumption I'd had, perhaps the joking about Emacs vs Vim preference in programmers made me assume the groups were of similar size.
hhh 3y ago
Why would emacs be larger? It’s anecdotal, but I’ve gone thru my entire life (I’m 25) without ever seeing it installed on a machine I have used or mentioned in any of the learning materials, when I was younger I only heard it as a flame war topic.

bborud 3y ago

I really hope not. I used Emacs for roughly 30 years. During the last 20 or så of those years I would try to use Eclipse, IntelliJ and other IDEs for a few months every 2-3 years, but none of them stuck. The extra functionality they provided was nice, but as editors they just didn't work for me. A few years ago it was time to try an IDE again plus I had spent another full working day trying to get Emacs set up properly to program Go. I was really tired of my setup breaking all the time and that adding support for specific languages took so much time. So I tried Visual Studio Code. I'm not sure why, but for some reason, this time it stuck. I started using VSC for writing Go code. I also write a bit of C/C++, but even on VSC that's still a pain in the ass. More because C/C++ tooling never got cleaned up and the only thing it has really accomplished over the past two decades is for the tooling to grow less usable, more complex and more infuriating. Not even the relatively high quality of VSC extensions seems to be able to fix that. I find it really hard to articulate what needs doing to "fix" Emacs, but I think part of the problem is that there's so few people doing real work on maintaining and developing Emacs - and even less coordinated work on writing extensions for Emacs. Lars Magne is making a heroic effort to close bugs and get Emacs into shape, but there just doesn't seem to be a large enough community to coordinate and streamline support for various languages. It's a mess. I really hope Emacs does not die. I spent most of my professional career writing code in Emacs. I like Emacs. But it needs people who can evolve its support for various languages and it needs people who can do so in a more coordinated fashion. One thing I think Emacs could borrow from VSC is the concept of synchronizing configuration across machines. That's something that should really be built into Emacs and I think that it may be one of those things one could use to drive evolution because it would force maintainers of extensions to think about streamlining.

thelastparadise 3y ago

Personally I got sick of vs code with its heavy slow gui, spying, and not-fully-baked extensions which seem to never play well together. The language server was a nice idea but so long and thanks for all the fish.

RuggedPineapple 3y ago

This is going to be one of those things where everyone shouts and stuff so I'm just pre-emptively putting it out there that this is only my experience and I can only speak for myself. But in my entire life, now in my 40s, I have met exactly one person who used emacs enough that I knew/they told me. I don't really have a dog in the fight between vi and emacs. Back when editing your xf86.cfg was something you had to do fairly regularly to get your gui back after looking at it the wrong way or saying something that offended it I would use vi just because the barrier to 'typing some words and saving the file' is lower, but I have no great appreciation for it either. I feel like both are... suitable for the limited environment they had, useful in a pinch, but everyone much prefers using something more intuitive.

buster 3y ago

"I don’t have figures at hand but it’s my impression that Emacs development and the introduction of major new features has accelerated lately. Regardless, it’s clearly not the case that development has slowed or stalled." For such a post, it'd be much nicer to have some statistics. It does come around as a post by some heavy user preaching that everything is fine and well but that's just a subjective view from a bubble. How many commits did emacs have over the last ~10 years? How many updates and packages in ELPA l/MELPA over the last years? I find it hard to believe that development has not stagnated a bit in times of all the new editors and lots of young new developers not having touched a terminal and growing up on full fledged IDEs. I'm saying that as someone liking emacs (I do occasionally use it), but using sublime text and intellij most of my time. I find emacs an incredible piece of software and which for emacs to stay around!

iLemming 3y ago
One also has to consider other factors. Despite the evolution of the core of Emacs not being impressive and possibly even stagnating, it is remarkable how many external packages are available. GitHub alone hosts numerous Emacs Lisp packages, making it the largest body of Lisp code among various Lisp dialects, surpassing Clojure, Common Lisp, Racket, and others. Isn't that impressive? Can someone name a single scripting language used exclusively for configuring a specific editor that is as widely used as Emacs Lisp? Elisp is not a general use programming language; it's not very popular, even among Lisp-hackers; it's not even a great Lisp - it lacks tons of nice features other Lisp dialects had for decades. Yet it is undeniably, the most used Lisp of them all. How can anyone observe all of this and claim that Emacs is dying?
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >How can anyone observe all of this and claim that Emacs is dying? Because LISP is also dying. Compare JavaScript vs Emacs Lisp on Google Trends. It doesn't make sense to have an editor exclusively have it's own language instead of reusing a commonly existing one.
  - iLemming 3y ago

cue_the_strings 3y ago

I never knew how popular Emacs is before going into finance (which definitely tends to attract older programmers on average). I'd say it's more popular than Vim in my environment, which is surprising. It definitely has the air of the ultimate "erudite" text editor. I'll stick with (neo)vim, though, I don't see the time investment to learn Emacs and build up a config as worth it + neovim with Lua and LSP works just fine and is rather easy to configure.

Avicebron 3y ago
For what it's worth, setting up a language with the LSP is dead simple in a .emacs file, editing my config is something I enjoy a lot with emacs, make a change, M-x load-file .emacs, boom, face highlighting, autocomplete, pretty much everything and more, surprisingly it ran better than when I tried VScode

troupo 3y ago

[flagged]

rednafi 3y ago
[dead]

charcircuit 3y ago

Even if it's not dying no one there cares about the user experience so stagnation is inevitable. Just compare the out of box experience for both VSCode and Emacs and it is no surprise why VSCode is more popular. Take a simple feature like showing different files that are open in tabs. Emacs' solution to switching between buffers is harder to use if you want to go between different files you have open. How many years do you think it will take before Emacs has tabs for different files open by default? A ubiquitous feature of text editors. This is what leads people to think Emacs is dead. It's stuck in a design from decades ago and the project is unable to evolve. It is only able to slowly iterate upon itself.

agumonkey 3y ago
User experience is highly relative. To me magit is peak UX, above many many tools.. but to some it's utter sh8t and they want vscode (even though they are the one sweating and ranting everytime they get confused).
- charcircuit 3y ago
  I agree that magit has relatively good UX compared to the rest of Emacs, but it is held back by Emacs' abhorrent performance. Magit however is not bundled with Emacs so I can not attribute its UX quality to the base Emacs editor. I do think of you did an actual user study you would find that it should be using more GUI elements to expose operations instead of keybindings
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    Except on windows I don't recall any performance issues that were not due to repo size. Magit is an extension of the old emacs outline mode, it inherits all the ergonomics culture around it (tab to fold, C-n/C-p for skipping, C-c C-c to validate..., k to kill). User studies don't apply here, it's too complex (due to the inheritance mentionned above). As I said, I have colleagues using other tools, they're slower and angrier, even with more buttons, which is somehow part of emacs culture.. don't create more widgets than necessary. And I'd argue it's irrelevant to good HCI for non mainstream duties.

rednafi 3y ago

I came to the game at the tail end of the Vim-vs-Emacs war. People pick up a particular editor not because it's always objectively better, but rather because it was the only available thing they liked at a certain point in time. Then, over the years, Newton’s first law takes over. Since I stepped into the industry only a few years ago, I didn’t see the appeal of spending so much time configuring a tool. So, neither Vim nor Emacs seemed like a sensible choice. I went with VSCode and forgot when was the last time I had to configure something. Now that we're seeing new editors like Zed making some splash, I'm exhibiting the same bias for VSCode that older programmers show for Vim or Emacs.

hasty_pudding 3y ago
Yeah I use nano if im remoted in and need to make a quick change and vscode the rest of thr time. My thinking is that if you need vim you actually need an ide or lightweight ide.
iLemming 3y ago
> People pick up a particular editor not because it's always objectively better, but rather because it was the only available thing they liked at a certain point in time. I've been programming for I dunno, over twenty years I think. I tried many different editors, tools, IDEs, specialized apps. I kept moving around. Started from Turbo Pascal and Borland tools on DOS, then continued using Borland Tools in Windows. Borland was fucking huge at that time, to the point (and I kid you not) that one of my college mates told me: "dude, I just learned that the first name of Pascal (the mathematician) was Blaise...I thought all this time that his name was Borland... That's how the company got its name, I thought..." I mean, he was not kidding, he seemed genuinely confused. Later I used Visual Studio (not VSCode). That was some almost absurdly heavy beast. It could die in the midst of compiling a project. The versions were so incompatible, often you couldn't even take a project created in one version of Studio and simply open it in the newer version. And so, often you'd have to have multiple instances of that thing open. Visual Studio had everything, including something called TFS (Team Foundation Server), that had tons of features for project management and some other crap, but for some reason most teams only used arguably the crappiest feature of TFS - the version control. It was quite some stupid shit and made me mad almost daily. When I discovered Git and learned it a bit, I stopped using stupid TFS, but I couldn't convince my team to switch, so I had to use a bridge to push my things to TFS. While I was learning Git, I accidentally stumbled upon Vim, and of course the first time seeing it I simply couldn't figure it out. I cursed out, and found a way to set a different editor as a default one. But shortly after, it made me thinking: "why would Git, such a clever and awesome tool choose to use this weird Vim-thing as a default editor?" I got intrigued and started learning Vim. After a month of hating myself, I suddenly realized that I no longer know how type in my editor like I used to. From that point on, whatever editor or IDE I would use, I invariably used with a vim-plugin. And If the tool didn't have one, I would just refuse using it. Then followed Sublime, Atom and finally Jetbrains products - WebStorm, Pycharm, RubyMine, IntelliJ Ultimate. I stayed with IntelliJ the longest - around seven years. I explored every single imaginable documented and not so-well documented feature of it. I had a huge poster on my wall of a printed cheatsheet. I discovered, reported, discussed and followed tons of bugs. Funny, sometimes, even now, I still get updates for things I filed back in 2012-2014. I felt like Andrey Vlasovskikh (at that time) maintainer of IdeaVim plugin had become my family. I loved IntelliJ. It was great. It had everything I wanted. If I ever felt the urge of thinking that I wanted something that it didn't have, I convinced myself to want less. For a relatively short period I had to use XCode, and OMG, compared to it, IntelliJ felt like a godsend. And one day, I took a flight from New York to San Francisco. My next-seat guy opened a laptop and started typing things in Emacs. I just couldn't help it. First, I pretended to be asleep and kept peeking. After forty minutes of that lame game, I simply couldn't hold it anymore and started asking questions. Until that point in my career, I haven't seen anyone coding like that guy - without googling things; without StackOverlfow; without constantly jumping between documentation, terminal console, utility apps, and the editor. It was all in one place. It was clean and strangely ascetic - no toolbars or menu, no icons, no progress bars, no multitude of numbers indicating different things. Another thing that fascinated me was how easily he manipulated window panes using only the keyboard. Clearly, he was "in the zone" - it seemed as if he had zero context switching. That was very different from how I wrote code and most of my colleagues as well. And he wasn't using some esoteric, little-known language. He was writing in Golang. I didn't know it then; still, it wasn't some completely alien thing to me. Yet some things I saw almost mesmerized me. That flight, though, wasn't enough to inspire me to try Emacs. Soon enough, I forgot about it. Three months later, I made a jump in my career. At my new job, there were a handful of Emacs users. I learned many new things from them (unrelated to Emacs). And that's when I installed Emacs on my machine for the first time. It still would take me another two years to transition. At some point, I realized that I have multiple things - IntelliJ, Vim, Emacs and Sublime (or Atom) open all the time, and I decided that I needed to start making cuts. My first fear was that I woudn't be able to vim as efficiently in Emacs as I used to. I was wrong. My second and major fear was that if I invest myself in learning Emacs, one day I inevitably find something that's not possible in Emacs, but still doable in IntelliJ and I would feel handicapped and would have to give up and move back and feel bitter for wasting my time. And once again, I proved to be wrong. Today, I cannot imagine doing any meaningful work without Emacs. From time to time I open AndroidStudio or VSCode and try to figure out some basic workflow there, but always move back to Emacs. It is hard to explain what makes Emacs such an irreplaceable tool for me - I'd have to write a book. But I do remember one of the first things that won me over. Search. Emacs has superior search I have not seen in any other tool. It offers too many different ways for searching things - locally, remotely, recursively, partially, contextually, dynamically, etc. With filtering the results and sifting through and editing at the same time. I dunno, I feel I pick Emacs over and over specifically because it is objectively better. For me. Someone else may have different opinion and their experience may not be the same, but I swear, no other editor or IDE makes me feel content. And not because I have little patience to learn new tools. I do very much like tinkering around my tools. And I do firmly believe that knowing my instrument well is not a part of my job. It is my job.

beshrkayali 3y ago

From my perspective Emacs is one of those pieces of software or technology that will never die. Just like RSS. But if you don't agree, and to quote the article: > I get so tired of that trope. Don’t like Emacs? I’m fine with that. Sorry you’re missing out, but fine. What I’m not fine with is people who don’t like Emacs and probably have never used it seriously declaring it a spent force.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Hugsun 3y ago

When I started using emacs around 10 years ago, it felt pretty stale and I had the impression that it hadn't been updated much in a long time. Now it feels like it's being very actively maintained. There are regularly new modern features being introduced. The fluid keyboard only interface (using doom emacs) is something I can't live without now. I have tried and failed to recreate the experience in VSCode.

globular-toast 3y ago
What is the fluid keyboard interface? Is this a combination of packages used by Doom or something bespoke?
- Hugsun 3y ago
  It is mostly the nicely integrated defaults of doom emacs. Browsing files, code completion suggestions, code references and search results can mostly be achieved with the same convenient keyboard shortcuts, the exceptions are very frustrating. There are quite a few packages involved but they are mostly managed and configured by doom. The default keyboard bindings play a huge role in the fluidity as well.

rcarmo 3y ago

I used Emacs very intensely a long time ago (to the point of reading mail and pretty much living inside it across various kinds of terminals. Then I learned vim, and the sheer efficiency of it (yes, I know about evil mode, this was 20 years ago) and never looked back. It’s just everywhere (I can run vim on my iPad via a-Shell, for instance, and even find myself using it inside VS Code’s terminal window…) I returned to it last year somewhat, because of my constant tinkering with LISP, but these days I see no real point in using it when I have so many GUI options and a better terminal experience with vim.

BillyTheMage 3y ago

Interesting comments, mostly from people who have been around the block a few times. Personally I'm young and I just picked up Emacs a few years ago. I'm still unashamedly in the evangelical phase, wanting to share it with everyone I meet. It's literally a gift from all the good deities combined. But I can see why it's not more popular. You need to be a programmer to make it even halfway usable. That's its power and its curse. Personally I think GNU Emacs is a dead end. If Emacs is to live on it needs to be rewritten from the ground up in Common Lisp, it needs to be multithreaded, and it needs to have default keybinds that target the average computer user; us wizards can change them with ease. I think Lem looks quite promising.

globular-toast 3y ago

It was dying when I started using it 15 years ago and it's been dying the whole time and still is. Apparently. Meanwhile I've had 15 years with Emacs and those who haven't have no idea what they're missing out on. Sad, but hey, you can't do everything in life. The only Emacs users I've encountered in the wild were university professors who use Emacs pretty much out of the box. Never met another programmer who uses it. Plenty have seen me use it over the years and tried to pick it up, but don't think any have stuck with it like me. For me Emacs is like a bicycle. It's the pinnacle of its technology class. Sure there are more convenient things like cars and VS Code, but these always come with tradeoffs and seem unsustainable in the long run. Emacs is a text editor for life.

iLemming 3y ago
> 15 years ago and it's been dying the whole time and still is Exactly. Just like Latin has been 'dying' for nearly 2000 years, or since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. And while it's long been considered 'dead' language, it continues to influence modern languages and remains a subject of study and use today. Emacs in the same way just refuses to die. Lisp hackers keep improving it and building cool things.

iLemming 3y ago

Thinking of Emacs simply as "an editor" is a misunderstanding that obscures its true nature and power. At its core, Emacs is an environment for seamlessly integrating a wide variety of tasks—text editing, shell command execution, software development, document formatting, and even games. The key ingredient enabling this amalgamation of features is Lisp, and most people when trying to talk about, learn, or understand Emacs often miss that point entirely. Lisp is one of the oldest high-level PLs that is still very much in use today. Its longevity and vitality itself speaks volumes. While most computer languages are defined in terms of operations and structures specified in an arbitrarily chosen syntax, Lisp is fundamentally built on the simple structure of symbolic expressions. In other word, Lisp can be seen as 'the DNA' of programming languages. From a philosophical viewpoint, Lisp embodies the concept of recursion. Recursion, philosophically, is a pattern that self-replicates, a principle we see in nature in things such as fractals, the Fibonacci sequence, and the structure of galaxies. In other words, Lisp encapsulates the concept of "everything is a subset of itself", reflecting the fractal nature of reality. From a poetic point of view, Lisp is fluid, expressive and malleable. It allows metaprogramming, where programs can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify themselves while running. This can lead to more concise, productive, and higher-level coding. In a sense, this reflects the poetic concepts of reflexivity, versatility and continuous evolution. Lisp is famed for embodying the essence of simplicity. It's the epitome of elegance expressed through minimalism. Its design philosophy espouses the principle of composing complex operations from a smaller set of primitives. As T.S. Eliot once said, “When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas.” The survival of Emacs is tied to the survival of Lisp, and Lisp is far from being obsolete. Its concepts are deep-seated in the world of programming and have shaped many modern languages. Just as Latin continues to live and breathe through its daughter languages and its impact across sciences, Lisp continues to pervade the technological universe due to its profound and timeless concepts. Learn some Lisp, and maybe you'll realize what makes Emacs such a powerful, incredible, and extensible tool and why it is timeless.

maxace 3y ago

> Being backed by microsoft means its always going to be better. my eyebrows launched off of my face

lycopodiopsida 3y ago

Emacs is not dying, but I don't know if it is well. I feel that for non-lisp developers it is only the last choice. Ecosystem is split between eglot and LSP, so you have to choose between debugger availability and performance for many languages. You have to do a lot of work to stop emacs opening buffers left and right on every occasion. Load times and micro-stutters make it a hard sell. Some amazing work was done in last years with jit compilation, but also some, imo bad decisions were done with the way treesitter was introduced. I love the introspection and self-documentation of emacs, but I just cannot justify using it after neovim, which is very sleek with telescope and mason, easier to configure, fast and just aesthetically more pleasant, to be honest. Maybe if I would not need editors for programming, I would be more interested in org-mode, but on itself it is not enough to keep me in emacs.