I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few.
I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back.
But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and feature discoverability. Hell, probably if IntelliJ toolset would allow me to customize it deeper with Lua/Lisp/JS/whatever I’d probably switch in a jiffy.
I compare Emacs to vinyls or paper books. It requires investment, in many cases it is worse than competition and requires more energy to just be on par. But it is absolutely lovable. Vinyl record comparison - they are expensive, heavy, require a lot of maintenance but for specific type of people it makes their heart skip a beat when they take it from the sleeve.
That’s why people are constantly talking about their Emacs. Same with vim or nvim. I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.
So yeah, if you’re not into it just keep in mind that like some freak who spend their weekend on polishing rims of dream come true 1959 Fiat 500, some of us spend their time with Emacs.
Don’t get bullied into it, don’t get FOMO about it, but please don’t spoil our fun.
I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs with very little of my own customization (doing TS, Scala, Rust mostly) a few years ago. There is not one thing of VSCode that I miss, and I enjoy some of the most powerful features like wgrep & all, and a great vim emulation layer (the one I had in VSCode sucked).
> It requires investment, in many cases it is worse than competition and requires more energy to just be on par.
One way to think of it is any tool requires some investment. The big difference with Emacs is it has always been around and always will be around, so you are continuously building upon that investment. Contrast that more modern tools. The learning curve is nowhere near as severe to start out, yet one is far less likely to learn how to use it so the same depth in the long term since it is far less likely to exist for the long term.
I've been using Emacs for 25 years, and I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file.
It's just a text editor. For many tasks it has better usability than the competition. This is why I use it. (Not for everything, though, and that's okay.)
I'd guess most people are like me. Configuring text editors is not our hobby.
I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.
Disagree. It's definitely falling behind in certain areas such as LSP support but overall it is just so much better than anything else I've tried in terms of moving around, macros, regular expressions that do what they're supposed to do, stability, stability of user interface (I could open an Emacs from 20 years ago and start using it immediately), quick and thoughtful response to bug reports…
It just works for me. It really, really does need some improvements in places but in other areas everything else just lags behind.
> I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.
VSCode? It's got its fan base and it's quite vocal. Actually, Didn't VSCode collate the majority of the former Atom users, as Atom collated the majority of SublimeText before it?
I share the same sentiment. It's taken me quite a while to be comfortable in Emacs, and honestly, I feel like I still need to spend more time to up my game in it.
My main gripe is dealing with several major modes at once, I still find that Emacs isn't the best at that.
I will say for anyone curious about Emacs, do try it out in your spare time. It's so much fun to customize and play around with.
At one point, my employer forced me to use Intellij products... I have no idea why anyone using Emacs would want that. It's awful all around. I also cannot imagine why would anyone come to conclusion that Emacs is like paper books. The UX is definitely better than in Intellij. And, feature discoverability is... well, it's for people with < 1 year experience. Who cares about their opinion? They know nothing, and are expected to not know anything.
> I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.
You seem to be living in a very remote area where no programmers can reach you, beside those using Emacs. Yeah, people using VSCode talk about it a lot, given an opportunity.
In an average programming company, programmers might talk more about Emacs because for the overwhelming majority it's a mystery. It's the same how others might be driven to discuss UFOs or weird cultural kinks found in distant lands. But, really, it's not an indication of anything.
Emacs is the best. I do not hesitate to recommend it. Will it work for you? I don't know. Might it be exactly what you were looking for? Yep! That's how it was for me: it gave me everything I ever wanted and more. Period.
i get that, though i would rather compare it with chopsticks than vinyl records.
you use emacs to do stuff, you dont just listen to/watch it do its thing.
chopsticks might not seem like a good metaphor at first glance, as they are much more simple, but they are highly compatible with a lot of tasks and can be utilized in many ways that a fork, spoon, spork or colander just wouldnt handle as well. to my mind, the simple thing hidden in emacs' complexity is that it is a closeted lisp machine
Just wanted to mention: the Community Edition of IntelliJ is open source. I used to routinely build it from source (but haven’t tried that in a few years). You might have fun making the extensions you want for more extension languages.
I have been using Emacs for 40 years and still love it, but I do find myself using VSCode more often now for Python work. Emacs has very good CoPilot support, but it sometimes lags a bit behind the support in VSCode. I also have started using a proprietary MarkDown editor instead of Emacs or VSCode.
For me a big draw of Emacs is that I have it easily configured for almost all programming languages I use.
When I open Android Studio I often think: "Man, how lucky we developers are, we have such great tools to do our work." I thought the same about Visual Studio with Whole Tomato's Visual Assist. And VS Code is not quite there, it has a chaotic keyboard navigation + highlighting issues, but it is a pretty good tool, for being a text editor.
I know you are doing a more vague accusation, but I don't appreciate being cast as bullying people into using Emacs. :) (Smile is intentional, not trying to be aggressive here.)
There is an odd aggression against Emacs that typically does lead to people having to go to extra effort to justify why they use it. And I can agree many of the justifications can feel like a stretch. They aren't false, though. Nor are we working on some archaic thing that only we can appreciate.
I'm also always amazed at how we think Emacs is somehow more archaic than anything else in a computer. Getting my kids into computers. It is Scratch to start, than probably crippled Python environments. That they are almost certainly going to break and wonder what happened. We even got started on some Arduino stuff, and their IDE is not bad, necessarily, but don't pretend like it is easy and quick in ways that Emacs isn't. Want to make a small game? Good luck, as there are no other environments for that anymore. (Used to, the computer booted into a BASIC shell in ages past.)
And this is avoiding the environments for content creation. Blender is amazing. And amazingly hard to use/explain. Fusion? TinkerCAD is at least easy to explain. But again, very easy to screw up in. (And I'm growing rather tired of all of the times I come back to a computer with hundreds of tabs in a browser all convinced they need to save data.)
All of that is to say, computers are tough. Period. I hope people can find a comfort zone for creation. But I am not convinced there is a single answer there. And more than happy to share what has worked for me.
I have only used IDEs and tried getting into emacs because I heard so many times how great it is, but it was the learning curve paired with the lack of good tutorials for beginners that made me eventually give up.
The Ingebrigtsen quote is meaningful. One should think of "using Emacs" not like "using Vim" but like "using the JVM."
Emacs is a powerful platform for building hackable, command-and-ui driven applications. You may not like the text editor that ships with a default Emacs install, but you don't have to use it! There are others (e.g. evil.)
There are also other applications. Some of my favourites are
- calc (desktop RPN calculator with advanced functionality)
- magit (context-aware git UI that interacts seamlessly with the git command line)
- sunrise commander (orthodox file manager that thanks to TRAMP can visit remote filesystems as if they were local)
- ediff (diff reconciliation between files)
and my train is coming now so this is where the list stops but it could go on for a long time.
Even though I've been using emacs as my main IDE for ~3 years (when I switched from Java in IntelliJ to Go), and using it for non-IDE tasks for ~5 years, I wouldn't recommend anyone builds a command-and-ui-driven application in Emacs if they have any expectation to use it outside of the Emacs ecosystem.
For example, I love magit and find it much nicer than many Git GUIs, but I would still recommend something like Git Kraken (or just the GIT CLI) to someone who is not already using emacs for other things.
Emacs is extremely idiosyncratic, and the barrier to entry of using an Emacs-based app is nowhere near as small as using a JVM-based app (and even that is too much for most uses).
"Calc was originally started as a two-week project to occupy a lull in the author’s schedule.
...
Emacs Lisp would surely reach its limits long before the project got too far out of hand.
To make a long story short, Emacs Lisp turned out to be a distressingly solid implementation of Lisp, and the humble task of calculating turned out to be more open-ended than one might have expected.
Emacs Lisp didn’t have built-in floating point math (now it does), so this had to be simulated in software. In fact, Emacs integers would only comfortably fit six decimal digits or so (at the time)—not enough for a decent calculator. So I had to write my own high-precision integer code as well, and once I had this I figured that arbitrary-size integers were just as easy as large integers. Arbitrary floating-point precision was the logical next step. Also, since the large integer arithmetic was there anyway it seemed only fair to give the user direct access to it, which in turn made it practical to support fractions as
well as floats. All these features inspired me to look around for other data types that might be worth having.
Around this time, my friend Rick Koshi showed me his nifty new HP-28 calculator. It allowed the user to manipulate formulas as well as numerical quantities, and it could also operate on matrices. I decided that these would be good for Calc to have, too. And once things had gone this far, I figured I might as well take a look at serious algebra systems for further ideas.
... (and on and on and on) ...
Final thanks go to Richard Stallman, without whose fine implementations of the Emacs editor, language, and environment, Calc would have been finished in two weeks."
If you look at its feature set, it is amazing how much can be done with it. It has nifty features like evaluating formulae inline in any buffer, and replacing the expression with the result. Expanding things to their LaTeX representation, etc.
I spent a lot of time trying to learn it. I use it for simple calculations, but ultimately decided it is not worth my time to go much further. That same effort would be better spent learning Sage, with a lot less cognitive load. And there is decent integration between Sage and Emacs.
OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful.
I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class.
I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs.
Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table.
Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns into a mail window (I used gnus), copy paste them into a calc window, do the calculation, copy the result onto the mail, and email the student. Go to the org buffer, and go to the next line. This took about 12 minutes to get right.
Keep pressing f4. Sending individual mails to 125 students took <5 minutes.
Maybe this is overkill, and I am sure excel wizards can do it in a few minutes. Nevertheless, I was surprised - if you spend time carefully recording the macro, the Emacs ecosystem (org+gnus+keyboard macros) is insanely powerful.
I used Emacs for a while and now I use Intellij. Now I don't understand the appeal of customizing the editor to such degree. I'm not that unique. I just want stuff that works. Give me the same setup as everyone else so that when issues arise everyone will push for them to get fixed and everyone can help each other.
I'm more of a vim guy, but "I get it". I started using these "serious" editors back in college and eventually settled with vim over emacs. I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game.
I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi, vim, nvim}. For the sake of this argument, emacs users face some form of the same too.
It got to a point where all my hardcore configurations made my editor experience diverge even further away from the promised "out of the box" experience, and not on par with autocomplete functionalities available in modern IDEs like VSCode.
So now I'm on VSCode. A M1 MacBook can handle it, so I told myself to quit being a masochist, and that itself saves me hours especially navigating a big and complex codebase. But I remember how to use vim, and that comes in handy if I have to SSH into some remote machine and make some tweaks to scripts.
"I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game."
This encapsulates my feelings completely, haha. Both require so much investment and you spend a lot of time with them, just like the pokemon you pick at the beginning.
At least for Emacs, dealing with big codebases isn't a problem. Modern approach to dealing with this is to use language servers. This is also what VSCode does. So, suggesting you have better autocompletion in VSCode vs Emacs (or Vim) is just a sign of not knowing how that works, because they are, literally, doing the same thing...
Gah, yet another instance of people treating Emacs like it’s a terminal application. It can run in the terminal, if a terminal is all you have, but you don’t want to do that. Use its default, graphical mode:
There are a million things to say here, and many have said them better than I can. But there's an important generational aspect to the discussion.
I learned Emacs in 1988 or so. Only a couple years before, I had traded my Commodore 64---on which I did real work, like writing term papers---for an IBM PC XT clone. WordPerfect. Hobbyist BBSer, but networking was in the future.
When I got to college, Unix and Emacs were a revelation. This is how it's supposed to work! And the background ASSUMPTION that you could understand everything, and control everything, was something nobody at the time would have questioned. With hindsight it turns out that understanding everything was a mirage and controlling everything was the gateway drug to possibly literal addictive behaviors, but that was the ethos.
I left CS after only a couple semesters, and my career has completely diverged from it. So it's a TOTAL FLUKE that today I can comprehend---god, the whole model! of a Lisp machine! of Lisp at all! For a young person starting with modern tools? Maybe we can agree that we all see the big chasm....
I’ve started to use emacs in my computer sciences school 30 years ago (EPITA in Paris). The Lab was surrounded by Mips, Sun, Alpha, … great time.
The only weakness of Emacs (according to me) was the lack of a good major mode (module) to edit web template : imagine editing a php block inside a javascript part embedded inside html.
After testing many modes, I started to develop web-mode (http://web-mode.org) that is now compatible with about thirty template engines. What a wondeful trip it was to discover the power of Lisp and what a pleasure it is everyday to know exactly what happens when I hit a key while editing an html file.
I am the only Emacs user in my company (kernix.com) but nothing would make me switch. I can not imagine using an editor that would not open in less than a second (or that would eat hundreds of Mo of RAM)
I Hope Emacs will see a usage surge with the inclusion of tree sitter… editing in emacs will be even faster and more robust. Not sure tree sitter is suitted for multi languages files … but for this you have web-mode ;)
I switched (over 7 years) from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to vim to neovim, to VSCode and back to neovim and even tried Helix before settling onto (Doom) Emacs a couple of weeks ago (lol)
Seriously, it feels unproductive a bit at first. But the productivity potential is 10x higher than any other tool or editor out there.
With org-mode, Magit, Projectile and dired, I already feel more productive than in VSCode or neovim. And more importantly, I feel like I'm shaping reflexes around the editor and thus creating my own workflow.
And evil-mode is the best emulation out there. I tried neovim inside VSCode but it's not yet there. So as a vim lover, I have two options (Neovim or Emacs).
The deal breaker was org-mode, It made me switch ... My organization skills are quite poor and I tend to forget everything all the time. But org-mode is a magical tool that's probably the best piece of software written to date !! And org-babel is quite cool too!
Anyway, the key takeaway is that my relationship with emacs is two-way shaping ... Meaning I can configure it to my liking with no barriers (other than elisp, I ask ChatGPT for help) and Emacs helps me shape my workflow and improve it.
It's not for everyone. It's not for most people. But it was a match for me :)
What sets Emacs apart for me is that it, unlike a lot of "unix philosophy" tools, it deliberately takes a sort of systems approach. The often used analogy is that an architect never just designs rooms in isolation, but only changes a room in the context of the house. It's the whole arrangement that matters, not its parts. And you can't infer the performance of the former from the latter.
The minimal approach to have 'one tool do one thing' ignores that all the complexity is in the interactions. People praise magit so much I think because like all other tools for Emacs, it's designed with Emacs and the common interface and language in mind. It's implicit in every extension people build.
When people today struggle how to combine all their dozens of tools from notetaking to developing, to file search to git and struggle to fit it all together I think the strength of learning Emacs comes through. My guess is that this is also one of the reasons for the popularity of VsCode as it takes a similar approach.
Emacs to me is probably one of the better examples of The Right Thing (c.f. Worse is Better essay), where UNIX is one of the canonical examples of WIB.
I really like your point about systems approach -- it's definitely a very holistic, cohesive piece of software. This is probably one of the reasons that it can be very difficult to add new features to Emacs.
I have been a faithful Emacs user for more than fifteen years now, even using a version of Emacs on my Amiga back in the 80s when I was just a kid. Over time, I have ported almost every aspect of my computational life to Emacs, including my editor, IDE, git-client, writing, documenting, and workflow automation. While I love the tool and enjoy tinkering with it, I have come to realize that there are dedicated tools out there that offer a much better user experience with less effort.
For example, when it comes to emailing, MailMate is an excellent tool that I have found to be much more effective. And for programming, VS Code is unbeatable for the overall experience. When it comes to my personal wiki, I find that Obsidian is simply too good to use Emacs + Orgmode. And for quickly capturing ideas, the Drafts app with its javascript extensibility is sweet, and a big plus: it's also available on my mobile phone.
Ultimately, I have come to realize that tinkering is a luxury that not everyone can afford. While I still use Emacs extensively as an editor with macros for transforming text, I find that those who want to focus on the task at hand cannot afford to spend more time tinkering than doing the job.
In conclusion, Emacs will always have a special place in my heart, but I have learned to recognize the value of specialized tools that offer a superior user experience with less effort. However, I should note that when it comes to regex-replace across files, BBEdit is the only thing that can beat Emacs.
I abandoned Emacs for a couple of years and tried various "modern" tools (VS Code, Logseq, etc.). The "out of the box" experience never felt comfortable to me. Yes, Emacs can be a hassle to configure, but I can't help going back to it. I now use Emacs again with Meow mode, and my old configuration. I guess I'll use it for the decades to come...
I love Emacs & it's my go-to editor, but I struggle to offer a solid, logical reason why.
I only use a handful of packages, a smidge of Org mode, minimal customisation, & run Emacs in the terminal, so switching to something more modern should surely give me everything I need & many more features in spades. But nothing else scratches the itch despite my best efforts to move to something else.
Perhaps for me Emacs is like an old pair of slippers: comfy, familiar, does what I need it to without fuss. I can't say whether it's a good choice for anyone else, but this grey beard engineer likes it.
> [Emacs is] a Lisp Machine with several compatible user interface modalities. Which is just amazingly helpful to [blind] people like me […] who are typically forgotten about these days. […] Emacs is a shining beacon in a dark age of canvases and decorative user interface design.
This. Even with my fairly correctable visual impairments, the way Emacs' text-driven interfaces and amazing search capabilities spare me from having to do any visual scanning is a blessing. I can always bring everything I need to see right in front of me, the whole interface scales perfectly, and I can easily ensure high contrast on everything I need to read, even with limited color vision.
The way that buffers can just live in the background and projects can simply be inferred from version control directories similarly free me from the entire spatial metaphor for open files, windows, projects, etc. No matter what window I'm in, I have the option to just list some open buffers, fuzzy filter as I type, and bring them directly into view. I run Emacs as a daemon so I can super easily pull up old buffers, complete with their contexts and undo histories and everything even if I close the Emacs frame (the application window) entirely.
I never have to scan or squint or interpret some tiny, inscrutable hieroglyph with Emacs. Every damn thing is searchable and filterable. And when I need documentation on some function or keybinding, it's the same story. I don't have to switch to another app and mouse around or toggle a browser extension to fix some dumbass website's choice of gray-on-gray text. It's just right there in my editor, clean and searchable and resizable/reflowable in the exact same way as my own code, in the fonts that I've chosen because I find them readable and pretty.
Emacs spares me from so much navigation effort while I'm editing, even without using any truly fancy features.
It's also a comfort knowing that if I should go blind before I reach old age, as is common in my family, I will still have access to that power and convenience through Emacspeak. I'd better start practicing!
I have been using emacs since around 2005. If you are looking to immerse yourself in emacs, then I highly recommend switching your windows manager to EXWM [1]. If you are looking to get over the learning curve, then I recommend buying the book Mastering Emacs [2]. If you are interested in learning new and creative ways to use emacs, then I recommend attending the next emacs conference [3]. Also, please join #emacs on librechat [4]. For IRC on emacs I really love erc-mode [5].
Emacs is the only software I've ever loved. People use the word love a lot, but I really mean it. You know it's love when you can't stop thinking about it. You're so excited you want to tell everyone about it, but you can't really articulate what exactly it is that makes you feel that way.
Emacs is great, but I don't advocate it anymore, even though it still has some great merits.
The main reason is that I'm concerned that we've lost ground on some very important ideas, for which we should've done a better job onboarding new techies in the last decade or two: open standards, open source, libre software, privacy, information security, etc.
There's vague stereotypes that I've seen newbies use to dismiss those ideas, bundling concern about those ideas in with "tells you that you should use Emacs" (or Vim). Which then discredits the whole basket at once.
So I'll just say it: The typical techie will probably be happier using an editor/IDE other than Emacs.
But it's important for our field and broader society that most techies learn and care about those other ideas.
Lots of talk about "fiddling with configs" here, but in my experience it's like a slow evolution over time: you adjust things here and there as you need them. That's a malleable system. It's not a constant tinkering, but a willingness and ability to adjust as you go.
AutoHotkey enables Emacs-like extensibility at the OS level rather than the application level. Some of my macros and shortcuts apply in every text field I interact with, even this comment field on Hacker News. Whether I'm editing in VS Code or vim or Microsoft freakin' Notepad, my macros travel with me. I like that a lot better than being locked into any specific editor and unable to get comfortable outside of it.
[+] [-] xlii|3 years ago|reply
I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back.
But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and feature discoverability. Hell, probably if IntelliJ toolset would allow me to customize it deeper with Lua/Lisp/JS/whatever I’d probably switch in a jiffy.
I compare Emacs to vinyls or paper books. It requires investment, in many cases it is worse than competition and requires more energy to just be on par. But it is absolutely lovable. Vinyl record comparison - they are expensive, heavy, require a lot of maintenance but for specific type of people it makes their heart skip a beat when they take it from the sleeve.
That’s why people are constantly talking about their Emacs. Same with vim or nvim. I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.
So yeah, if you’re not into it just keep in mind that like some freak who spend their weekend on polishing rims of dream come true 1959 Fiat 500, some of us spend their time with Emacs.
Don’t get bullied into it, don’t get FOMO about it, but please don’t spoil our fun.
You’re always welcome to join in.
[+] [-] forty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] II2II|3 years ago|reply
One way to think of it is any tool requires some investment. The big difference with Emacs is it has always been around and always will be around, so you are continuously building upon that investment. Contrast that more modern tools. The learning curve is nowhere near as severe to start out, yet one is far less likely to learn how to use it so the same depth in the long term since it is far less likely to exist for the long term.
[+] [-] otabdeveloper4|3 years ago|reply
It's just a text editor. For many tasks it has better usability than the competition. This is why I use it. (Not for everything, though, and that's okay.)
I'd guess most people are like me. Configuring text editors is not our hobby.
[+] [-] uhtred|3 years ago|reply
I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.
[+] [-] _a_a_a_|3 years ago|reply
It just works for me. It really, really does need some improvements in places but in other areas everything else just lags behind.
[+] [-] ocimbote|3 years ago|reply
VSCode? It's got its fan base and it's quite vocal. Actually, Didn't VSCode collate the majority of the former Atom users, as Atom collated the majority of SublimeText before it?
[+] [-] cyrialize|3 years ago|reply
My main gripe is dealing with several major modes at once, I still find that Emacs isn't the best at that.
I will say for anyone curious about Emacs, do try it out in your spare time. It's so much fun to customize and play around with.
[+] [-] crabbone|3 years ago|reply
> I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.
You seem to be living in a very remote area where no programmers can reach you, beside those using Emacs. Yeah, people using VSCode talk about it a lot, given an opportunity.
In an average programming company, programmers might talk more about Emacs because for the overwhelming majority it's a mystery. It's the same how others might be driven to discuss UFOs or weird cultural kinks found in distant lands. But, really, it's not an indication of anything.
[+] [-] SeqDesign|3 years ago|reply
Emacs is the best. I do not hesitate to recommend it. Will it work for you? I don't know. Might it be exactly what you were looking for? Yep! That's how it was for me: it gave me everything I ever wanted and more. Period.
[+] [-] mlatu|3 years ago|reply
you use emacs to do stuff, you dont just listen to/watch it do its thing.
chopsticks might not seem like a good metaphor at first glance, as they are much more simple, but they are highly compatible with a lot of tasks and can be utilized in many ways that a fork, spoon, spork or colander just wouldnt handle as well. to my mind, the simple thing hidden in emacs' complexity is that it is a closeted lisp machine
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|3 years ago|reply
I have been using Emacs for 40 years and still love it, but I do find myself using VSCode more often now for Python work. Emacs has very good CoPilot support, but it sometimes lags a bit behind the support in VSCode. I also have started using a proprietary MarkDown editor instead of Emacs or VSCode.
For me a big draw of Emacs is that I have it easily configured for almost all programming languages I use.
[+] [-] teddyh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oblio|3 years ago|reply
A minor joke here:
> Hell, probably if IntelliJ toolset would allow me to customize it deeper with Lua/Lisp/JS/whatever I’d probably switch in a jiffy.
It's not going to be quick and it's not going to be pretty, but I think you could technically do it with Clojure :-)))
[+] [-] qwertox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|3 years ago|reply
There is an odd aggression against Emacs that typically does lead to people having to go to extra effort to justify why they use it. And I can agree many of the justifications can feel like a stretch. They aren't false, though. Nor are we working on some archaic thing that only we can appreciate.
I'm also always amazed at how we think Emacs is somehow more archaic than anything else in a computer. Getting my kids into computers. It is Scratch to start, than probably crippled Python environments. That they are almost certainly going to break and wonder what happened. We even got started on some Arduino stuff, and their IDE is not bad, necessarily, but don't pretend like it is easy and quick in ways that Emacs isn't. Want to make a small game? Good luck, as there are no other environments for that anymore. (Used to, the computer booted into a BASIC shell in ages past.)
And this is avoiding the environments for content creation. Blender is amazing. And amazingly hard to use/explain. Fusion? TinkerCAD is at least easy to explain. But again, very easy to screw up in. (And I'm growing rather tired of all of the times I come back to a computer with hundreds of tabs in a browser all convinced they need to save data.)
All of that is to say, computers are tough. Period. I hope people can find a comfort zone for creation. But I am not convinced there is a single answer there. And more than happy to share what has worked for me.
[+] [-] tronx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcdwealth|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kqr|3 years ago|reply
Emacs is a powerful platform for building hackable, command-and-ui driven applications. You may not like the text editor that ships with a default Emacs install, but you don't have to use it! There are others (e.g. evil.)
There are also other applications. Some of my favourites are
- calc (desktop RPN calculator with advanced functionality)
- magit (context-aware git UI that interacts seamlessly with the git command line)
- sunrise commander (orthodox file manager that thanks to TRAMP can visit remote filesystems as if they were local)
- ediff (diff reconciliation between files)
and my train is coming now so this is where the list stops but it could go on for a long time.
[+] [-] simiones|3 years ago|reply
For example, I love magit and find it much nicer than many Git GUIs, but I would still recommend something like Git Kraken (or just the GIT CLI) to someone who is not already using emacs for other things.
Emacs is extremely idiosyncratic, and the barrier to entry of using an Emacs-based app is nowhere near as small as using a JVM-based app (and even that is too much for most uses).
[+] [-] BeetleB|3 years ago|reply
"Calc was originally started as a two-week project to occupy a lull in the author’s schedule.
...
Emacs Lisp would surely reach its limits long before the project got too far out of hand.
To make a long story short, Emacs Lisp turned out to be a distressingly solid implementation of Lisp, and the humble task of calculating turned out to be more open-ended than one might have expected.
Emacs Lisp didn’t have built-in floating point math (now it does), so this had to be simulated in software. In fact, Emacs integers would only comfortably fit six decimal digits or so (at the time)—not enough for a decent calculator. So I had to write my own high-precision integer code as well, and once I had this I figured that arbitrary-size integers were just as easy as large integers. Arbitrary floating-point precision was the logical next step. Also, since the large integer arithmetic was there anyway it seemed only fair to give the user direct access to it, which in turn made it practical to support fractions as well as floats. All these features inspired me to look around for other data types that might be worth having.
Around this time, my friend Rick Koshi showed me his nifty new HP-28 calculator. It allowed the user to manipulate formulas as well as numerical quantities, and it could also operate on matrices. I decided that these would be good for Calc to have, too. And once things had gone this far, I figured I might as well take a look at serious algebra systems for further ideas.
... (and on and on and on) ...
Final thanks go to Richard Stallman, without whose fine implementations of the Emacs editor, language, and environment, Calc would have been finished in two weeks."
If you look at its feature set, it is amazing how much can be done with it. It has nifty features like evaluating formulae inline in any buffer, and replacing the expression with the result. Expanding things to their LaTeX representation, etc.
I spent a lot of time trying to learn it. I use it for simple calculations, but ultimately decided it is not worth my time to go much further. That same effort would be better spent learning Sage, with a lot less cognitive load. And there is decent integration between Sage and Emacs.
[+] [-] b0afc375b5|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xlii|3 years ago|reply
Never heard about sunrise commander though.
[+] [-] billfruit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sn41|3 years ago|reply
I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class.
I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs.
Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table.
Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns into a mail window (I used gnus), copy paste them into a calc window, do the calculation, copy the result onto the mail, and email the student. Go to the org buffer, and go to the next line. This took about 12 minutes to get right.
Keep pressing f4. Sending individual mails to 125 students took <5 minutes.
Maybe this is overkill, and I am sure excel wizards can do it in a few minutes. Nevertheless, I was surprised - if you spend time carefully recording the macro, the Emacs ecosystem (org+gnus+keyboard macros) is insanely powerful.
[+] [-] worldsayshi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzhenghao|3 years ago|reply
I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi, vim, nvim}. For the sake of this argument, emacs users face some form of the same too.
It got to a point where all my hardcore configurations made my editor experience diverge even further away from the promised "out of the box" experience, and not on par with autocomplete functionalities available in modern IDEs like VSCode.
So now I'm on VSCode. A M1 MacBook can handle it, so I told myself to quit being a masochist, and that itself saves me hours especially navigating a big and complex codebase. But I remember how to use vim, and that comes in handy if I have to SSH into some remote machine and make some tweaks to scripts.
[+] [-] phonebucket|3 years ago|reply
I decided to allow myself as many extra features as I wanted with one caveat: all plugins had to be pure vimscript.
Reproducing an exact dev environment is just a git clone away, because there are no external dependencies outside of vim itself.
This is not very restrictive: you have fuzzy search with Ctrl-P, get full-featured language server support with vim-lsp etc.
This is possible because Vim8+ (released 6 years ago) has a native plugin manager which is very easy to manage via git submodules.
[+] [-] cyrialize|3 years ago|reply
This encapsulates my feelings completely, haha. Both require so much investment and you spend a lot of time with them, just like the pokemon you pick at the beginning.
[+] [-] geysersam|3 years ago|reply
But vim moves and keybinds are just too good.
If there was a combination that actually worked well, I'd switch in a heartbeat. But so far I haven't encountered an option with all of:
* vim bindings (no compromises)
* great completion / IDE experience
* no configuration
Currently my "pick 2 out of 3" is low config nvim, with bad completion as a result...
[+] [-] LinXitoW|3 years ago|reply
Personally, most vim emulations in most editors are "good enough", so I generally use Intellij (Java) or VSCode (everything else) with Vim modes.
[+] [-] crabbone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaunsingh|3 years ago|reply
I haven't heard that before, but I feel like that's the best way to decribe it.
~~emacs~~ water type pokemon are the best clearly.
[+] [-] teddyh|3 years ago|reply
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/
You get not only graphics and colors, but also better keybindings which aren’t limited to 1970’s ASCII control codes.
[+] [-] kickaha|3 years ago|reply
I learned Emacs in 1988 or so. Only a couple years before, I had traded my Commodore 64---on which I did real work, like writing term papers---for an IBM PC XT clone. WordPerfect. Hobbyist BBSer, but networking was in the future.
When I got to college, Unix and Emacs were a revelation. This is how it's supposed to work! And the background ASSUMPTION that you could understand everything, and control everything, was something nobody at the time would have questioned. With hindsight it turns out that understanding everything was a mirage and controlling everything was the gateway drug to possibly literal addictive behaviors, but that was the ethos.
I left CS after only a couple semesters, and my career has completely diverged from it. So it's a TOTAL FLUKE that today I can comprehend---god, the whole model! of a Lisp machine! of Lisp at all! For a young person starting with modern tools? Maybe we can agree that we all see the big chasm....
But I will never give it up.
[+] [-] fxbois|3 years ago|reply
The only weakness of Emacs (according to me) was the lack of a good major mode (module) to edit web template : imagine editing a php block inside a javascript part embedded inside html.
After testing many modes, I started to develop web-mode (http://web-mode.org) that is now compatible with about thirty template engines. What a wondeful trip it was to discover the power of Lisp and what a pleasure it is everyday to know exactly what happens when I hit a key while editing an html file.
I am the only Emacs user in my company (kernix.com) but nothing would make me switch. I can not imagine using an editor that would not open in less than a second (or that would eat hundreds of Mo of RAM)
I Hope Emacs will see a usage surge with the inclusion of tree sitter… editing in emacs will be even faster and more robust. Not sure tree sitter is suitted for multi languages files … but for this you have web-mode ;)
[+] [-] abdellah123|3 years ago|reply
Seriously, it feels unproductive a bit at first. But the productivity potential is 10x higher than any other tool or editor out there.
With org-mode, Magit, Projectile and dired, I already feel more productive than in VSCode or neovim. And more importantly, I feel like I'm shaping reflexes around the editor and thus creating my own workflow.
And evil-mode is the best emulation out there. I tried neovim inside VSCode but it's not yet there. So as a vim lover, I have two options (Neovim or Emacs).
The deal breaker was org-mode, It made me switch ... My organization skills are quite poor and I tend to forget everything all the time. But org-mode is a magical tool that's probably the best piece of software written to date !! And org-babel is quite cool too!
Anyway, the key takeaway is that my relationship with emacs is two-way shaping ... Meaning I can configure it to my liking with no barriers (other than elisp, I ask ChatGPT for help) and Emacs helps me shape my workflow and improve it.
It's not for everyone. It's not for most people. But it was a match for me :)
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
The minimal approach to have 'one tool do one thing' ignores that all the complexity is in the interactions. People praise magit so much I think because like all other tools for Emacs, it's designed with Emacs and the common interface and language in mind. It's implicit in every extension people build.
When people today struggle how to combine all their dozens of tools from notetaking to developing, to file search to git and struggle to fit it all together I think the strength of learning Emacs comes through. My guess is that this is also one of the reasons for the popularity of VsCode as it takes a similar approach.
[+] [-] mcqueenjordan|3 years ago|reply
I really like your point about systems approach -- it's definitely a very holistic, cohesive piece of software. This is probably one of the reasons that it can be very difficult to add new features to Emacs.
[+] [-] sbuk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] submeta|3 years ago|reply
For example, when it comes to emailing, MailMate is an excellent tool that I have found to be much more effective. And for programming, VS Code is unbeatable for the overall experience. When it comes to my personal wiki, I find that Obsidian is simply too good to use Emacs + Orgmode. And for quickly capturing ideas, the Drafts app with its javascript extensibility is sweet, and a big plus: it's also available on my mobile phone.
Ultimately, I have come to realize that tinkering is a luxury that not everyone can afford. While I still use Emacs extensively as an editor with macros for transforming text, I find that those who want to focus on the task at hand cannot afford to spend more time tinkering than doing the job.
In conclusion, Emacs will always have a special place in my heart, but I have learned to recognize the value of specialized tools that offer a superior user experience with less effort. However, I should note that when it comes to regex-replace across files, BBEdit is the only thing that can beat Emacs.
[+] [-] zvmaz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lyngbakr|3 years ago|reply
I only use a handful of packages, a smidge of Org mode, minimal customisation, & run Emacs in the terminal, so switching to something more modern should surely give me everything I need & many more features in spades. But nothing else scratches the itch despite my best efforts to move to something else.
Perhaps for me Emacs is like an old pair of slippers: comfy, familiar, does what I need it to without fuss. I can't say whether it's a good choice for anyone else, but this grey beard engineer likes it.
[+] [-] pxc|3 years ago|reply
This. Even with my fairly correctable visual impairments, the way Emacs' text-driven interfaces and amazing search capabilities spare me from having to do any visual scanning is a blessing. I can always bring everything I need to see right in front of me, the whole interface scales perfectly, and I can easily ensure high contrast on everything I need to read, even with limited color vision.
The way that buffers can just live in the background and projects can simply be inferred from version control directories similarly free me from the entire spatial metaphor for open files, windows, projects, etc. No matter what window I'm in, I have the option to just list some open buffers, fuzzy filter as I type, and bring them directly into view. I run Emacs as a daemon so I can super easily pull up old buffers, complete with their contexts and undo histories and everything even if I close the Emacs frame (the application window) entirely.
I never have to scan or squint or interpret some tiny, inscrutable hieroglyph with Emacs. Every damn thing is searchable and filterable. And when I need documentation on some function or keybinding, it's the same story. I don't have to switch to another app and mouse around or toggle a browser extension to fix some dumbass website's choice of gray-on-gray text. It's just right there in my editor, clean and searchable and resizable/reflowable in the exact same way as my own code, in the fonts that I've chosen because I find them readable and pretty.
Emacs spares me from so much navigation effort while I'm editing, even without using any truly fancy features.
It's also a comfort knowing that if I should go blind before I reach old age, as is common in my family, I will still have access to that power and convenience through Emacspeak. I'd better start practicing!
[+] [-] dustfinger|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/wiki
[2]: https://www.masteringemacs.org/
[3]: https://emacsconf.org/
[4]: https://libera.chat/
[5]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/erc.html
[+] [-] globular-toast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbc|3 years ago|reply
"I’m using Linux. A library that Emacs uses to communicate with Intel hardware. — Erwin, #emacs, Freenode"
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
The main reason is that I'm concerned that we've lost ground on some very important ideas, for which we should've done a better job onboarding new techies in the last decade or two: open standards, open source, libre software, privacy, information security, etc.
There's vague stereotypes that I've seen newbies use to dismiss those ideas, bundling concern about those ideas in with "tells you that you should use Emacs" (or Vim). Which then discredits the whole basket at once.
So I'll just say it: The typical techie will probably be happier using an editor/IDE other than Emacs.
But it's important for our field and broader society that most techies learn and care about those other ideas.
(Disclosure: https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/ )
[+] [-] scroot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfiggers|3 years ago|reply