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Well, you either have "pre-assembled" hamburger, or freedom to cook your own. Imagine going to McDonalds and asking them to let you into their kitchen to custom

Well, you either have "pre-assembled" hamburger, or freedom to cook your own. Imagine going to McDonalds and asking them to let you into their kitchen to customize your burger from scratch, choose specific ingredients, adjust cooking temperatures, and rearrange their workflow to match your preferences. Asking Emacs to be "batteries included" misses its fundamental nature - it's not a fast-food IDE, it's your own personal kitchen for crafting exactly the development environment you want. Even starter kits - Doom, Prelude, Spacemacs, etc. - are not really "ready-made" products; they're more like recipe books, where you have the freedom to choose and pick from, but they still don't liberate you from having to learn how to "cook things." They don't "magically" solve things for you.

billfruit 2y ago
Yes, but is there any argument to not to have intelligent automatic code completion out of the box, as a user today.
- iLemming 2y ago
  In the context of Emacs, absolutely. I, for one, love the fact that the completions aren't an opinionated set of rules, and anyone can configure them to their liking. Why would I let anyone upstream dictate how those rules should apply, on my computer, in my editor? For example, when working in a Clojure codebase, I don't want to blindly rely on CIDER completions because they work only when you have a connected REPL. I want to leverage LSP completions (if it's connected), and I also want completions for my code snippets, filenames, keywords specific to the language, words in comments, etc. If tomorrow I wanted to use different rules, applying them dynamically based on some conditions - Emacs provides ways to achieve that. So yes, for completions specifically, I don't want them to be rigidly embedded in the core of Emacs. I prefer this feature to be an extension. Interestingly, Emacs is so versatile that some extensions are built so well that sometimes you completely forget they are not built-in features or an afterthought; they feel as if the editor was specifically designed to have them.
  - billfruit 2y ago
    I have nothing against completions being configurable or extensible, but only about not having a reasonable default set of capabilities shipped with the system and having to depend on extensions of various qualities and states of completion and which may further depend on other 3rd party components to provide such a core functionality for modern work.

billfruit 2y ago

Yes, but is there any argument to not to have intelligent automatic code completion out of the box, as a user today.

iLemming 2y ago
In the context of Emacs, absolutely. I, for one, love the fact that the completions aren't an opinionated set of rules, and anyone can configure them to their liking. Why would I let anyone upstream dictate how those rules should apply, on my computer, in my editor? For example, when working in a Clojure codebase, I don't want to blindly rely on CIDER completions because they work only when you have a connected REPL. I want to leverage LSP completions (if it's connected), and I also want completions for my code snippets, filenames, keywords specific to the language, words in comments, etc. If tomorrow I wanted to use different rules, applying them dynamically based on some conditions - Emacs provides ways to achieve that. So yes, for completions specifically, I don't want them to be rigidly embedded in the core of Emacs. I prefer this feature to be an extension. Interestingly, Emacs is so versatile that some extensions are built so well that sometimes you completely forget they are not built-in features or an afterthought; they feel as if the editor was specifically designed to have them.
- billfruit 2y ago
  I have nothing against completions being configurable or extensible, but only about not having a reasonable default set of capabilities shipped with the system and having to depend on extensions of various qualities and states of completion and which may further depend on other 3rd party components to provide such a core functionality for modern work.