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I share that impression. Emacs only lives on as an imaginary yang to vim. vim has found a certain niche as a skill that functions through a text mode ssh becaus

by usrusr 3y ago

I share that impression. Emacs only lives on as an imaginary yang to vim. vim has found a certain niche as a skill that functions through a text mode ssh because when you use it as a minimalistic editor that's exactly what it is. Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" and so people who have their IDE slot already taken will naturally gravitate to vim if nano is not enough. Some of those might eventually switch you vim completely, but it's also happy in the middle ground situation. It certainly comes as a surprise, but it turns out that vim offers a more inviting on-ramp than emacs.

iLemming 3y ago
> Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" People want to do everything in Emacs not because it forces them to, but because it allows you to do a bunch of things in a very cohesive manner. Trust me, taking notes while reading a PDF, jumping from a specific page to your notes and vice-versa, linking a YouTube video to the specific note, extracting subtitles for that video, feeding the entire transcription to ChatGPT to generate the summary for that vid, then composing Anki card content and pushing it to your Anki collection for that subject. Or even doing something utterly stupid like forcing Google Translate to expand numbers to their written form:https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_surely_not_joking_when_they_say_emacs/kkbpuyg https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_sur.... That all, is extremely empowering and liberating. People often say: "These workflows you describe sound amazing, but I don't see myself doing them." Before Emacs, I wouldn't have considered doing things like that in a single app. I would have tried finding a specialized app for each thing. Becoming an Emacs hacker changes your mindset. Why settle for anything else when I can run it with a simple keystroke? And it's not just about saving time or not losing focus. It's just inexplicable fun to have refined control over text. Any kind of text.

by usrusr 3y ago

iLemming 3y ago

> Emacs on the other hand keeps shouting at you "if you don't use me like a fully fledged IDE you're doing it wrong" People want to do everything in Emacs not because it forces them to, but because it allows you to do a bunch of things in a very cohesive manner. Trust me, taking notes while reading a PDF, jumping from a specific page to your notes and vice-versa, linking a YouTube video to the specific note, extracting subtitles for that video, feeding the entire transcription to ChatGPT to generate the summary for that vid, then composing Anki card content and pushing it to your Anki collection for that subject. Or even doing something utterly stupid like forcing Google Translate to expand numbers to their written form:https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_surely_not_joking_when_they_say_emacs/kkbpuyg https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1aey0eo/they_are_sur.... That all, is extremely empowering and liberating. People often say: "These workflows you describe sound amazing, but I don't see myself doing them." Before Emacs, I wouldn't have considered doing things like that in a single app. I would have tried finding a specialized app for each thing. Becoming an Emacs hacker changes your mindset. Why settle for anything else when I can run it with a simple keystroke? And it's not just about saving time or not losing focus. It's just inexplicable fun to have refined control over text. Any kind of text.