5 ms·

As a long-time Emacs user, I find the presence of package managers somewhat disturbing. I'm not all that excited about fetching an elaborate dependency graph of

• jordigh 12y ago
  Me too, I eschew package managers and just put stuff in .emacs.d as I want it, and version it: http://inversethought.com/hg/dotemacs/file/b1915cf8617c/packages http://inversethought.com/hg/dotemacs/file/b1915cf8617c/pack... Like you, I'm probably stuck in my ways too. I just don't trust any package manager but Debian's apt. I also don't like this trend of having one (or more!) package managers per programming language.
• klibertp 12y ago
  > Maybe this is just me being stuck in my ways... Probably. By default Emacs is passable Elisp IDE and nothing more, really. Sure, it has a bunch of neat (disabled by default, mostly) built-in plugins (also tetris and doctor mode), but its main strength lies in how easy it is to extend and customize it. With plugins you first promote Emacs to absolutely outstanding Elisp IDE, then you get beautiful Elisp stdlib (strangely missing from core distribution) and from that point onwards you're already in editor heaven, because you can very easily install and modify every conceivable piece of functionality. Right now I have 143 packages installed with package.el, about 30 packages installed via git (and cedet via bzr, I also build Emacs from bzr repo for ease of dumping it), 3051 lines of my own Elisp scripts, one package I installed from package.el but later rewrote completely (fuzzy-find-in-project, another 423 loc), another 254 loc in custom-set-variables and dependencies on thousands of lines of Python, Ruby, JS, Clojure, C (for example the-silver-searcher, among other more standard tools) and others. The thing is, I'd probably have exactly the same Emacs config as you instead were it not for package.el. It's a scary thought for me now - going back to vanilla Emacs (I sometimes use Zile instead of Vim on remote machines) feels like I reverted to using notepad.exe, the difference is just that great. Without an easy way to install and experiment with packages I would probably install manually a few plugins I knew I wanted (because I used them before in Vim) and I wouldn't have moved forward at all. For example, there is this wonderful info+.el by Drew Adams. Take a look at its Emacs Wiki page - to install it you need to manually download and require some 5 files (which is good, modular design and should be encouraged) which is a pain by itself. I probably wouldn't install it out of laziness. Then I'd never read absolutely fabulous Emacs, Emacs Lisp, Org Mode or Fugitive (cover to cover!) Info manuals, because really, documentation in black-and-white without syntax highlighting just isn't my thing any more (my eyesight getting worse and all). In effect, my Emacs would still be just Emacs instead of being MY Emacs, and I'd probably left it sooner or later (but now I'm being vendor-locked-in with myself being a vendor for most part, which is kind of scary too ;)). The Emacs I use beats Sublime in terms of features easily and has - after a year of using it - literally thousands of little (and bigger) functions which make me more productive, more comfortable, better informed and plain happier than I'd be with vanilla Emacs. And it was package.el which enabled me to make my Emacs like this.
  • mschaef 12y ago
    > By default Emacs is passable Elisp IDE and nothing more, really. To my eye, that's a bit of an overstatement. I used a mostly unconfigured Emacs for years to write C, Lisp, and Scheme and found it to be quite suitable. My approach to customizing it has largely been to identify pain points and then work to find low impact ways of working around them. At first, it was relatively simple things like binding filename extensions to modes and tweaking buffer coloring. Later on, I realized that I wasn't using any of the GUI widgets (toolbar, menubar, and scrollbar) and disabled them entirely. That was shortly followed by an OSX recompile that added a full screen mode, prior to OSX having the feature natively. I've done some larger scale customizations too, but those tend to be shorter lived and focused on specific projects. When I ran more on Windows, I had cygwin enhancements running in Emacs. I'm doing more Oracle these days, so I have SQLPlus mode linked in. I also work with Clojure mode (essential) and js2-mode (nice, but I could live without it). Because I use git, I tried magit mode, found it to be slow and cumbersome, and switched back to the git command line. The two longer-term customizations I've found to be useful are a enhancement to org-mode that I wrote to keep a personal notebook/wiki, and a simple elisp wrapper I wrote around Maven for building Java projects. I wrote these to address specific common use cases in my work flow, and as I find pain points, I try to find cheap and easy ways to file them down. Honestly, I tend to keep the customization code as simple as I can, because I'd really like to spend as much of my time on 'real work' as I can, and the editor is just a means to that end. If you're interested to see what that looks like in Emacs Lisp terms, I've maintain my .emacs here for the last few years. (Prior to github, I just copied the files around, which was as painful as it sounds.) https://github.com/mschaef/.emacs.d https://github.com/mschaef/.emacs.d > Its main strength lies in how easy it is to extend and customize it. Agreed, but for me, the brilliance is that it makes it easy to write small customizations that are still quite powerful. Eclipse is fully extendable in theory, but the barrier to entry is high due to the complexity. While Emacs does support a lot of that kind of 'big' customization, it also makes it easy to gain small point victories with small amounts of code and complexity. Another quick example of this is that about ten years ago I was writing a small unit test library for a scheme system I was developing. I really wanted the ability to jump to the source of the failing tests. Getting this done in Emacs was as simple as modifying the format of the test failure messages to match one of Emacs' compile error message formats. Then, the 'next-error' function just did what it should. It took an hour or two of effort and a half dozen lines of code to make a huge difference in my daily productivity at the time.