[HN Gopher] 916 Days of Emacs
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916 Days of Emacs
Author : d-s
Score : 191 points
Date : 2023-04-13 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
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| leephillips wrote:
| I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates
| often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn't respond
| instantly I don't want to use it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Use a vanilla config (i.e. no config), and it's pretty fast.
| rirze wrote:
| Recent releases have greatly improved performance.
|
| That is, unless you're talking about launching emacs each time
| you want to edit a single file, then emacs won't load instantly
| like vi will.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Eh, you can run Emacs as a daemon and starting a client is
| pretty fast.
| velox_neb wrote:
| I'm an emacs fan but there's no excuse. It's insane that an
| editor from the 1970's is perceptibly laggy on the latest
| Macbook Pro.
|
| This is a good article about the problem
| https://discourse.doomemacs.org/t/why-is-emacs-doom-slow/83/...
| all2 wrote:
| It's still single threaded.
| pascal_wizzard wrote:
| Well it really depends on what operations you expect to be
| instant. Basic editing like movement, inserting, etc is
| instant, but summing from 1 to 100000000000000000000000 is
| where elisp would show its poor performance.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| This is basically why I don't use intellij.
|
| Work pays for everything, I just dont want to wait 10 minutes
| for an environment to change.
| peterashford wrote:
| I use Goland at work - which is intellij. Switching between
| project environments is about 2 seconds. Cold start is about
| 5 seconds.
| Icathian wrote:
| People talk about its slowness, but I've got mine pretty damn
| kitted out and it's still faster than VSCode, VStudio, and
| JetBrains products. It's not as fast as vim, I'll admit,
| though.
| numbers wrote:
| I love posts like this. It reminds me of having fun with
| computers is so rewarding. Reading a post like this reminds me of
| being young and diving into Vim and learning new tricks with it
| every day!
| sanitycheck wrote:
| 282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that
| 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with
| config.
|
| I don't even want to spend 45 mins a _month_ fiddling with
| config. I really don 't understand Emacs people.
| cyrialize wrote:
| It's part of the fun. Once you realize how much you can do
| within Emacs, it becomes really easy to fiddle.
|
| That being said, I'm also one of those people that break my
| Emacs config often, and I have a different version on each PC I
| use.
|
| Not every user is like this though! Many try to keep their
| setup as stable as possible.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The whole point of emacs is that it's not "fiddling with
| config", it's programming. Which is an activity a lot of people
| enjoy.
|
| Emacs is essentially an IDE for developing emacs.
| medstrom wrote:
| Plus, with time it becomes more like writing programs and
| less configuration. I write Elisp commands like I used to
| write shell scripts. These commands do entirely new things. I
| feel that can't count as mere configuration.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Yep. Just wrote this today to prettify all the tables in a
| Markdown file: (while (not (eobp))
| (while (not (markdown-table-at-point-p))
| (forward-char 1)) (markdown-table-align)
| (goto-char (markdown-table-end)))
|
| I'd have no idea how to do this in vim!
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| A macro and a plugin installed with the markdown-table-
| align equivalent? Though you could also use this approach
| with emacs macros too.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with
| config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
|
| Some people like to customize their environment to their exact
| specifications. Others will use whatever is available and never
| change it.
|
| That is not required. Although default Emacs is pretty
| barebones (from a modern interface standpoint, not features)
| one can get a pretty good kickstart by using something like
| Spacemacs or Doom emacs and only sprinkling a bit of
| configuration here and there.
|
| I too had a pile of config accrued over years - mostly porting
| features from other editors to Emacs. After adding Doom, I have
| just a few lines, it does all the rest.
|
| The point is - usually on other editors you need to either wait
| for someone to create a "plugin" to do what you need, or you
| need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a
| small task. In Emacs, it's extremely easy to create functions
| that will do tasks for you. And that gets addictive.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| When I first started using emacs I spent 10 hours a day for
| many months customizing it.
| layer8 wrote:
| Plus the time for writing that blog post. ;)
| warp wrote:
| I have four commits to my .emacs in 2022 and eight in 2021, all
| fairly minor. So I guess that's about 45 minutes per year on
| average :)
| EnigmaCurry wrote:
| Its a hardly a requirement, some people just enjoy doing it.
| You can just use someone else's config, lots to choose from.
| peterashford wrote:
| I wrote a few functions for my emacs configuration. It's simply
| that I wanted the editor to work differently. And I could not
| do that in literally any other editor.
| markrages wrote:
| In my last 20 years of using emacs, I have spent about 45
| minutes total fiddling with the config. (Before that I spent a
| little more time getting it set up.) Am I missing out on
| something?
| spudlyo wrote:
| For me, Emacs as a Lisp programming environment is just a lot
| fun! I was a big fan of the iPython REPL, but always
| struggled with reliably reloading modules when I made changes
| to functions and classes. With Emacs Lisp, I don't worry
| about any of that. Everything is so interactive and hands-on!
| It's easy to change and introspect the state of the system
| while it's running. The built-in debugger is pretty great
| too. It's a really nice way to work.
| Laaas wrote:
| That's 28k dollars to configure Emacs, if we assume 100 USD /
| hour...
| nequo wrote:
| By that argument, watching The Irishman costs 350 USD.
| throwawaysalome wrote:
| Odd that you chose The Irishman (2019) to evince the
| opportunity cost fallacy. The toll of that schnoozer can't
| adequately be measured in dollars.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Where's your mercedes?
| sampo wrote:
| > 282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from
| that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day
|
| It's 0.43 hours a day, which is 26 minutes, not 45. (Hint: 0.5
| hours is 30 minutes.)
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Superb point, I did always suspect I'm an idiot but it's
| useful to have it pointed out sometimes!
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| There's a very good reason for it. I spend about an hour every
| month. It sharpens your tool and pays back massively over time.
|
| When we need to quickly debug or carry out a complex operation
| at work? People gather around my machine. Once you're set up
| with things like org-mode, magit, lsp your productivity goes up
| a lot.
| throwawaysalome wrote:
| Some guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys
| find they can get to B faster and more safely if they can
| modify the car.
| dwringer wrote:
| Furthermore I'd say that I (presumably like most emacs users)
| am probably closer to 45 minutes per month, or per year, on
| general emacs config stuff, certainly not per day. It has
| still made a huge difference for me in terms of convenience
| and just general aesthetics.
| 1066 wrote:
| Right, it's an extension of your life right. Some people
| find it fulfilling to kit out there house with exactly what
| they think they desire. Its just a matter of processing the
| stuff that makes you happy while providing _internal_
| development.
| [deleted]
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with
| config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
|
| The problem is in the terminology: _Config_
|
| Replace the word with _programming_ and it will all make sense.
| People who write Javascript code to build custom tools for
| their own use are doing the exact same thing as Emacs users
| tweaking their config.
|
| These days when I have time I'm writing elisp to make it easier
| for me to write math notes. One org roam node per
| concept/definition/proof. However, I'm building a graph: If a
| definition of a math object involves prior knowledge, I want to
| link to those nodes. The default org roam interface makes this
| a pain, so I want an interface that prompts me for the title,
| and lets me select dependencies one by one. It then inserts the
| node, with links to all those dependencies.
|
| Where does all this code go?
|
| In my config.
| ddavis wrote:
| Cool post! I really don't want to know how much time I've spent
| configuring Emacs over the last 12 years :P The explosion of
| great Emacs Lisp packages over the last few years has absolutely
| made it difficult to avoid forever playing around with Emacs.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Have you tried any of the distributions? I have had sort of a
| semi-annual ritual of re-evaluating my emacs configuration.
| This last December I've tried Centaur out and while it's not
| perfect, it's not too bad. Definitely an interesting place to
| start from.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Oh man. I'm embarrassed to say I've been using emacs for almost
| 40 years and it probably accounts for 80% of my screen time.
|
| I wonder how many people know emacs predates gnu-emacs? I
| remember being skeptical of open source until I saw what gnu
| emacs could do. Then I got slightly more skeptical when I looked
| at the code ;-)
| superdisk wrote:
| Tell us more. What were you using before GNU?
| tjr wrote:
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5736
|
| is about pre-GNU Emacs, with history of Emacs going back to
| the mid-1970s.
| Y_Y wrote:
| How many fingers do you have left?
| lanstin wrote:
| I got less enamoured of GNU when I started reading glibc. It
| works and it's solving for a complex set of build constraints
| and so on, but wow, it is not what I'd type.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. Thank god for musl.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| Software people are hilarious. Wow, I sure hate using this
| amazingly working and workable product because I don't like
| what the source code looks like! I'm so glad there's an
| alternative that looks prettier!
| comonoid wrote:
| The first 916 days of Emacs are always the hardest.
| pjkundert wrote:
| 916 days to flatten the curve!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I
| decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back
| just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over
| and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight
| lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the
| hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs
| cursor movement commands, which are (for some reason) the default
| cursor movement commands in most command line environments like
| the Postgres CLI.
| jb1991 wrote:
| > the default cursor movement commands in most command line
| environments like the Postgres CLI.
|
| and also macOS!
| circuit wrote:
| I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite
| conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily
| driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-
| mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I
| don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for
| the readline movement commands.
|
| > to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.
|
| Most of vim is written in C with some interfaces exposed for
| scripting. Emacs is mostly written in elisp with some C code
| where necessary. The latter lends itself better to
| 'hackability' imo
|
| For my own machines, I build emacs and import my saved init.el
|
| On other machines, there is usually a standard vi/vim install
| that I can use if I am ssh'd in somewhere where I don't have my
| personalized copy of emacs. If I remember, I'll try to put
| these five lines[1] in the .vimrc for some saner defaults
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25410390
| outworlder wrote:
| Why don't you SSH _from_ Emacs?
|
| If you are editing a remote file there's usually no need to
| SSH and then invoke an editor.
|
| https://willschenk.com/howto/2020/tramp_tricks/
| [deleted]
| circuit wrote:
| I used to, and I probably would if I had to work with
| remote files more often. But in my experience I found it
| faster to just build emacs on the remote server and run it
| as a daemon there, since all the machines I was working on
| remotely had /home on an NFS mount. TRAMP took just a
| little too long to load remote directories for my liking.
|
| But in case I am plopped in front of an unknown
| terminal/have to do something on someone else's machine ...
| at least I can rely on using the default vim to do basic
| editing.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Does that mean you have a nice setup for running emacs as
| a server on a remote machine and connecting via a local
| client? I've tried this a couple of times but it seems to
| be prohibitively awkward and I'm stuck with the
| idiosyncrasies of Tramp or even just saying in a vterm.
| I'd be very grateful if you (or anyone else) can explain
| how to do this.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| I just run emacs on the remote server (inside tmux),
| emacs works great on the terminal, in fact, I don't use
| GUI emacs. code, orgmode, magit are just text.
| lanstin wrote:
| Yeah, this is how I do it. If it's a reasonably modern
| remote image you even get color highlighting. And in a
| way, it lets me segregate, "on this host, I'm working on
| this project, on this host I'm on this project, all the
| state/context is there when I re-activate my tmux ready
| to see what's up.
|
| If I'm writing a lot of code or doing a refactor needing
| more thought, I'll do it locally, to be sure.
| LastNevadan wrote:
| When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX,
| the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see
| which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials.
|
| I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my
| undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on
| with my life using vi.
|
| After I had been programming professionally for about ten
| years, I decided that my harsh judgement as an undergraduate
| was often incorrect. (I had also deemed Voltaire, Spanish,
| sociology, microeconomics and many other things as "stupid",
| and came to understand as an adult that they weren't.) So, I
| decided to give emacs another chance.
|
| My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your
| fingers are almost always on the home row. Emacs wants you to
| hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch
| typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit
| escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's
| not that hard to hit.
|
| I noticed that _lots_ of skilled and professional engineers
| never learned to touch type. That discovery itself was odd to
| me: why would a professional programmer not want to invest the
| time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your
| productivity significantly. But they do. And my conclusion was
| that emacs was for them, because hitting the control /alt key
| isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists.
| Your fingers are almost on the home row. Emacs wants you to
| hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch
| typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit
| escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's
| not that hard to hit."_
|
| In emacs you can type exactly the same as in vi/vim if you
| use something like evil, doom, or spacemacs.
| archarios wrote:
| Unless you use a keyboard like a Dactyl Manuform that
| provides your thumbs with better access to such modifier keys
| https://github.com/abstracthat/dactyl-manuform
| BeetleB wrote:
| > why would a professional programmer not want to invest the
| time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your
| productivity significantly.
|
| I have not found typing speed to correlate well with
| productivity. I spend quite a lot of time thinking while
| coding.
| tric wrote:
| > Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is
| difficult for a touch typist.
|
| hmm.... I wonder if this is the reason Mac OS uses the option
| key for things like 'kill word' (ctrl+backspace on other OSes
| or ctrl+w in vi). I have a hard time typing quickly using
| option/command instead of ctrl.
|
| I also prefer vi-like keybindings.
| wrs wrote:
| Original Macs didn't have a control key.
| throwawaysalome wrote:
| [flagged]
| Blackthorn wrote:
| > I noticed that lots of skilled and professional engineers
| never learned to touch type. That discovery itself was odd to
| me: why would a professional programmer not want to invest
| the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your
| productivity significantly. But they do.
|
| This is a false dilemma. Plenty of us type quickly without
| hunting and pecking, or looking at the keyboard, without
| home-row touch typing. This comment was typed as such.
|
| There isn't anything "proper" about home row style touch
| typing, it is merely one of multiple ways to type fast.
| shagie wrote:
| > My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists.
| Your fingers are almost on the home row. Emacs wants you to
| hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch
| typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit
| escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's
| not that hard to hit.
|
| I had been playing rogue and nethack for a bit when I started
| programming. The keys hjkl for doing movement was a natural
| transition to a vt-100 terminal for writing code in vi.
|
| I had also been coding in LPMuds for a bit and the ed command
| set was firmly engrained in my mind. With vi being both "move
| using rogue keys" and "do the fancy stuff with the ed
| commands" there wasn't even a second thought spent on
| considering emacs.
| peterashford wrote:
| I simply rebound the keys.
| keybored wrote:
| > In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid"
| and went on with my life using vi.
|
| That's what we do when we're younger. Judge things on the
| wrong basis. Or come up with weird theories on how people who
| prefer different things do so because they're deficient in
| some way--
|
| > Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is
| difficult for a touch typist.
|
| wait what...
|
| > And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because
| hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when
| you're a hunt-and-peck typist.
|
| You see that the there are Alt and Control keys on _both_
| sides of the (American[1]) keyboard. Right? Touch typing is
| no harder with Control and Alt than it is with Shift.
|
| > And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because
| hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when
| you're a hunt-and-peck typist.
|
| One Year of Experience Ten Times Over: The Comment.
|
| [1] The keyboard (ish) that these silly programs were kind of
| made for. The "European" keyboard has AltGr on the right
| side.
| smokel wrote:
| Many people who use Emacs a lot make CapsLock an additional
| Ctrl. Using your left-hand little finger makes it trivial to
| use C-p, C-n, C-f, C-b as cursor keys.
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| I've always just used the palm of my hand. You can work a
| keyboard with more surfaces than just your fingertips.
| ejolto wrote:
| Lots of vim users do that too, in fact the ADM-3A terminal
| vi was written on had ctrl where caps-lock is now and
| escape where tab is.
| lanstin wrote:
| I never thought of making tab be alt/escape. Hmm.
| tmtvl wrote:
| That's weird, I'm a Dvorak touch typist and I find the Alt
| keys to be much easier to reach than Escape. To reach Escape
| I basically have to leave the home row, while to reach one of
| the Alts I simply have to bend my ring finger.
| weaksauce wrote:
| why didn't you just use evil mode? vim is great and so is emacs
| and with evil mode you get vim inside emacs. i still use emacs
| for magit as it's hands down the best git gui i've seen so far.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but
| I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while
| back just to see what all the fuss was about.
|
| This is like saying that you have been a mountain biker all
| your life, but then decided to play the trumpet for one year.
| Nonsensical conjunction.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Nonsense. Emacs and vi have similar use cases, right? And
| similar inputs (keyboard) and similar environments, for
| similar users.
|
| They might be a difference of degree along a few axes, but
| they aren't a difference of kind like trumpets and mountain
| bikes are.
| smabie wrote:
| As someone who used Emacs 10yrs before ditching it.. I just
| really don't think it's very good at doing much.
|
| I mean sure it can sorta half ass a lot of different things
| but besides org-mode and magit, it's a pretty mediocre and
| clunky piece of software (clunky, incredibly slow, ugly, etc)
| alyandon wrote:
| I had a very similar experience and at the end of the day I
| switched back to vi(m) (and specialized IDEs) mostly because I
| didn't have the time to constantly evolve my emacs environment
| to solve the tasks at hand efficiently. I can see the appeal of
| emacs though if you really have the time and energy to deep
| dive and make it your own environment.
|
| To this day, I still swap ctrl/capslock - that is so useful
| that it should just be a standard.
| mtnygard wrote:
| They're the default keys because a lot of programs use the GNU
| readline package for line editing.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| It's also possible to configure GNU readline on your system
| to use vi keys. See
| https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Use_vi_shortcuts_in_terminal
|
| Put this in ~/.inputrc set editing-mode vi
| set keymap vi-command
| neilparikh wrote:
| You'll also want `set show-mode-in-prompt on`.
|
| Note that this feature is broken when you have a PS1 with a
| \n in it, in an older version of readline/bash (I am not
| sure which), so if you're having this problem, just upgrade
| your bash version.
| pxc wrote:
| > the emacs cursor movement commands, which are (for some
| reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command
| line environments like the Postgres CLI.
|
| I think this is because they're used in GNU readline. They're
| also defaults in all the macOS GUIs, though, so maybe not.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > GNU readline
|
| Interesting... I always assumed that emacs was around for a
| while before anybody generalized a "readline" library, but I
| guess it makes sense that readline would have come first.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I am personnally fan of command line vi modes. readline has one
| (bash, gdb, and others), zsh and fish have (a better) one too.
| I have remapped Caps Lock to Esc and it's never been easier to
| just go up and down the history with j an k and to make quick
| edits.
| taeric wrote:
| The default cursor movement commands probably predate emacs.
| Such that you are used to readline defaults.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083753 is the first post
| I'm finding on that.
|
| That said, I'm curious what the weight of emacs was on you? If
| it was that you were wanting to be in the other editor, than it
| makes sense that you should stay in the other editor. But this
| is no different than a lot of things. Is why some folks don't
| like changing the vehicle type that they use daily. Very little
| rational argument one way or the other. Such that, yes, you
| should use what makes you happy. Not only does it make you
| happy, but you are probably more effective because of that.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > what the weight of emacs was on you
|
| What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all
| customize it _heavily_ - I didn 't want to do that, since to
| me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always
| available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I
| did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but
| at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just
| using an IDE.
|
| But that's just me.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Yeah I _adore_ picking at my config to solve some small
| issue. Or implement a cool feature or customization.
|
| I don't really use Emacs for the editor! It's more because
| it's a very configurable language runtime/vm with an editor
| interface.
|
| And org-mode is great too.
| spear wrote:
| I've been using Emacs for more than 30 years and my init
| file is mostly loading and configuring extra packages, and
| not customizing the editing behavior. I have no problem
| working in a basic "emacs -q" session (which skips loading
| the init file) when I don't want to "pollute" my main
| session (eg. working with huge logs/dumps).
| taeric wrote:
| This has gotten easier as the years go by, as well.
| Standard emacs has a lot of affordances that computers
| just couldn't do without bogging down the system years
| ago.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all
| customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to
| me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's
| always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen
| to be. "_
|
| So you not customize vim either?
|
| If you don't, you're missing out 99.999% of the greatness
| of both editors and doing yourself a huge disservice.
|
| It's like being a carpenter and limiting yourself to only
| ever using a screwdriver.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > you not customize vim
|
| No, and I have a specific reason - I ssh into remote
| boxes a _lot_ , and I want the editor to work more or
| less the same wherever and whenever I use it. I guess I
| could customize vi to be a multi-purpose IDE but...
| that's what I have IntelliJ for.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| If you're using vi or vim for really simple tasks, and
| not using it much, you're not missing out by not
| customizing it.
|
| But the more you use it, the more you're missing out by
| just using vanilla vi or vim... and I hesitate to mention
| them in the same sentence because even vanilla vim is
| thousands of times more powerful than vi.
|
| Vim's true power, however, lies in its customization and
| plugins. You're really missing out by restricting
| yourself this way.
| taeric wrote:
| Oddly, I haven't customized mine heavily. I'd assert that
| there really isn't a single "crowd" that are computer
| users. All the more true for stuff as customizable as
| emacs.
|
| Even more amusing, I'm fairly certain I had more
| customization in vim before I decided I wanted to learn
| lisp. What ultimately killed my customization in all
| things, was I felt like I was customizing on top of a very
| shaky foundation. Emacs/vim are stable enough, of course.
| But building/packaging software is basically a giant
| playground.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| What all the hype is about depends on how you use emacs, what
| you add to it and how you configure it.
|
| I used vi and vim for 25 years before switching to emacs, and I
| spent a ton of time making it very vim like.
|
| Now my emacs can do way more than vim ever did. Things like:
|
| - browse the web through emacs - read my email through emacs -
| use org-mode to take notes in outline format, with hyperlinks,
| tables, executable source blocks, etc - use magit, which is a
| great interface to git
|
| All of these things and more are tightly integrated, so moving
| text/data between them and editing that data is seamless.
|
| It's all programmed and configured in elisp, and is part of a
| gigantic elisp ecosystem. Though I much prefer Scheme to elisp,
| I like elisp far more than vimscript, python, lua, or pretty
| much any other non-lisp language.
|
| Emacs has some shortcomings (like handling long lines and large
| files, and certain types of regex handling that vim can do
| better), and while I do occasionally still fire up vim, I've
| felt no yearning to go back to it permanently.
|
| For me emacs does everything vim did and far, far more.
| w0m wrote:
| magit and org-mode are the two items that made me try emacs a
| few times now. Never been able to make it stick though.
| lanstin wrote:
| What browser do you use? I used to use w3 but it is
| unsatisfactory now.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| emacs-w3m
|
| I've also tried eww, but don't like it as much.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > and certain types of regex handling that vim can do better
|
| Hi, emacs user here, can you elaborate please.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| See the \zs and \ze patterns in vim.
|
| I've asked for them to be implemented in evil, but have
| been told it's not possible because evil just uses emacs'
| regex engine, which can't do this.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I think these are lookahead's in some parlance, Emacs
| doesn't support them. On the rare occasions I need
| something like that I just use capture brackets. Suppose
| I want to delete a contiguous string of 'a' but only if
| it's followed by the letter 'b', then
| a+\(b\) - \1 aaaab aa
|
| gets you b aa <--
| unchanged cos no trailing b
|
| So it works with a simple case. I guess it could get
| messy if you're doing anything really complex but TBH the
| above is about as far as I have ever needed to go.
|
| Good luck vimming!
| pmoriarty wrote:
| A need I've had on multiple occasions is to, for example,
| search for the next occurance of "abcdef" but have my
| cursor land on the "d".
|
| In vim that's a simple abc\zsdef
|
| It also highlights just the "def", which is nice.
|
| To highlight just the "de", you could use abc\zsde\zef
|
| Yes, you could probably use some lisp magic to do the
| same in emacs, but it's not nearly as easy or convenient.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I guess in the next eight hours somebody will post you a
| snippet of elisp which will do what you want. Emacs
| people are very accommodating. Let's see anyway
| softirq wrote:
| I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion.
| There's really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge
| sell over just using vim which is a much better _editor_ unless
| you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues -
| tramp being a major one. It's slow and very unreliable.
|
| Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It's a great
| editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git etc.
| Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they're all
| usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc. If
| you're not editing and need email, mutt is a great email
| client. Irssi is a great chat client. Emacs is very much an all
| or nothing computing environment.
|
| I am glad I tried Emacs though, because I did love which-key
| and ended up adding it to my Vim config. And Emacs is slightly
| easier to quit?
|
| ADVICE: Try both Emacs and Vim vanilla before you do anything
| else. Downloading a "distro" is really doing yourself a
| disservice by not showing you just how much either can do
| without the chrome. And for the love of RMS DON'T USE VSCODE.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| > There's really nothing killer in Emacs
|
| 1. Org mode 2. Magit 3. Wdired 4. Synergy between various
| components (shameless plug: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_b
| enefits_of_everything_being...)
| goldfeld wrote:
| Also related plug, a newsletter with emacs plugins to help
| out with, mostly org mode and AI and emacs integration open
| source tepos.
|
| https://generativereview.substack.com/p/tasks-open-source-
| em...
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| I wouldn't call Magit "killer" at this point, its basically
| feature competitive with other editor git integrations and
| that is about it
| softirq wrote:
| 1. Org mode - I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode
| and find it to be oversold and another time waster for
| people who are already wasting time configuring their
| editors. I personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin
| for org mode.
|
| 2. Magit - Tim Pope is the pope of Vim plugins and fugitive
| is easily as good or better than Magit. I have never had
| any issue doing any sort of complex task in git or fixing
| conflicting using fugitive.
|
| 3. Wdired - Tim Pope again has vim-vinegar to improve
| netrw. Never had a problem or thought about manipulating
| directories inside of Vim.
|
| 4. Again, if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you
| have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do
| too much and therefore is not really the best at anything.
| And more importantly, if there's something that Emacs can't
| do you've screwed yourself because you haven't built an
| environment around many distinct tools on the command line
| and it's going to be awkward to integrate.
| kqr wrote:
| > if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to
| admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too
| much and therefore is not really the best at anything
|
| On the contrary, Emacs tries to do just one thing:
| provide an Elisp runtime for other applications. It does
| this fairly well.
|
| Do not confuse Elisp applications like evil, org, calc,
| magit, etc. with Emacs itself!
| ragnese wrote:
| Yep. If you see Emacs as a text editor with lots of
| features, then it's doing lots of things. But, if you see
| Emacs as a platform that comes bundled with some apps by
| default, then its "one thing" is to be a text-oriented
| app platform.
|
| The whole "do one thing" slogan is kind of vacuous
| anyway; e.g., what if my "one thing" is "implement all
| WWW standards to be able to use any web page"? Is that
| still "one thing"? If not, then wouldn't implementing
| only "one" part of WWW be useless?
| gaetgu wrote:
| > I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode and find it
| to be oversold and another time waster for people who are
| already wasting time configuring their editors. I
| personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin for org
| mode.
|
| I actually use emacs _solely_ for org-mode. I find
| editing single files and even larger projects to be more
| of a pain that it is worth, so I just use my custom vim
| to do that.
|
| What keeps me with org mode and emacs is mostly
| bibliography management. I have emacs set up to read my
| Zotero directory, and with a keybinding I can insert a
| reference to a book or magazine or the such. Now, what is
| really great about this is that when I export the org
| file (usually to latex->pdf, but also occasionaly to
| HTML), it exports the references in the style that they
| need to be in (MLA, APA, Turabian, etc.) and creates a
| bibliography page at the end of the export with
| everything that I referenced.
|
| I can also add notes to any references using org-roam, so
| that I have have annotated bibliographies quite easily.
|
| If I could have something else that does just this, I
| would drop emacs in a heartbeat. But until I do find
| that, emacs and org-mode it is.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Same. I have try many outliners to irrationally avoid
| emacs but they all suck compared to org-mode.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Again, if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you
| have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to
| do too much and therefore is not really the best at
| anything.
|
| If.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| How do you surf the web in vim?
|
| How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim?
|
| Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC?
|
| Mainly, though, is vim programmed in and extended through
| a lisp, and does it have an entire lisp ecosystem built
| around it?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love vim, and used it and vi for 25
| years before switching to emacs. But my emacs can do far,
| far more than vim ever did... and there's no way I'll be
| switching back until it has all the above and more.
| mr337 wrote:
| I am in the same boat. Been working a lot with C++ recently
| and could not get debugging working. Threw in the towel and
| loaded vscode in about 2 hours had everything humming along
| and being productive.
|
| I'm pretty sure I did the wrong thing and started with a
| setup like Spacemacs where random stuff would break and
| wouldn't even know where to look. Thought I can't seem to
| loose the muscle memory of vim bindings so evil is a must. On
| my next round will try dooms or centaur so I learn more under
| the hood. I do miss magit and helm.
| kqr wrote:
| Huh, my experience is the other way around. The "killer" of
| vim is the control scheme, and evil mode ports that over very
| faithfully to emacs. Then you get the best of both worlds.
| Why would you use vim other than in very barebones
| environments where you cannot access your own config?
|
| (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up
| workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)
| softirq wrote:
| Why would I want to run an emacs layer adding more latency
| to my work to turn Emacs in to Vim when, as I said, I can
| do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim.
|
| > (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up
| workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)
|
| Because it will randomly freeze and it's single threaded,
| it's slow, and it's also not novel. Vim can also edit files
| over SSH, VSCode can run itself remotely.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they're all
| usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc"_
|
| This is a bold claim. Not that fzf isn't good, but I'd like
| to hear about some specific ways in which fzf is better.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The tell in your message (and those in general from vim
| users), is insisting on treating Emacs as an editor, and
| comparing it primarily on that benchmark.
|
| There are no shortage of Emacs lovers and users who will
| accept that vim is a better editor. You didn't need to try
| Emacs to gain that appreciation.
|
| The other tell (common on HN, which has a clear selection
| bias), is comparing Emacs to an IDE like VS Code. Many, if
| not the majority, of Emacs users are not _primarily_ using
| Emacs for coding.
|
| > Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy.
|
| Neither follows the Unix philosophy well. And as many people
| have pointed out, most of the Unix utilities are poor at
| following it well.[1] The amusing thing about the Unix
| philosophy is that when you stay within Emacs, the Emacs
| environment is a _much better_ exemplar of the Unix
| philosophy than Unix and its tools are. It is a _lot_ easier
| to compose functionalities in different Emacs packages than
| it is in UNIX.
|
| I was using a Mastodon client for Emacs and wanted to render
| LaTeX formulae into rendered equations. I'm an average elisp
| coder and I got this working in under an hour by composing
| different Emacs packages.
|
| There are various ChatGPT clients out there. I wanted to
| integrate it with my Emacs email client (notmuch). It's not a
| lot of work. I doubt one could integrate things into mutt as
| quickly/easily.
|
| When reading an email in Mutt, how easy is it to quickly do a
| Web/network query on a selected text, perform analysis on the
| result, and display the outcome _within_ Mutt? The analogue
| is fairly easy in Emacs, despite the mail tool(s) there not
| having any functionality to do this.
|
| As for Mutt in general: I used it for about a decade. While
| it has a soft spot in my heart, there is a reason I switched
| to an Emacs client - before I knew anything about customizing
| Emacs with elisp. There were lots of gaps in Mutt that other
| clients out there filled. I miss nothing from Mutt, other
| than the color scheme.
|
| In many of these cases, there are simply _no_ quick, viable
| solutions outside of Emacs. People spend a lot of time doing
| these things in Emacs because it enables them to do more than
| they could otherwise. Imagine someone who doesn 't know any
| programming complaining about someone else who does. To them
| they just see a person "wasting" all their time on another
| "tool".
|
| [1] An example:
| https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/25/unix-doesnt-
| follow...
|
| I've had the same visceral reaction when dealing with grep
| and find. Overly complex and bloated (albeit extremely
| useful).
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| [flagged]
| BeetleB wrote:
| Take a look at EmacsConf talks and count how many talks
| are not programming related. Start delving into the
| speaker's backgrounds as well.
|
| Hang out at the Emacs subreddit and you'll see a similar
| trend.
|
| Follow Sacha's weekly Emacs news and you'll see a similar
| trend.
|
| Some of the authors of very well known Emacs packages
| don't do programming for a living - in fact quite a few
| learned programming just so they could improve Emacs for
| their own needs.
|
| Protesilaos is practically a legend these days. He went
| from no programming or Linux knowledge to expert level in
| a very short time.[1] His background is in philosophy,
| law and economics.
|
| The author of helm, one of the most popular and possibly
| the most powerful completion package in Emacs, is a ski
| instructor.
|
| Although I learned Emacs primarily to code, I myself did
| not use it primarily for programming for the first 5
| years. I was using it for email and org mode, and did my
| programming via Visual Studio. The number of people who
| primarily use it for org mode is _huge_. There are plenty
| of people who code in anything else (vim, VSCode), but
| use Emacs just for magit.
|
| [1] https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-04-16-emacs-
| moral-lesso...
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| everything you refer to is less than 0.5% of emacs use
|
| maybe 0.2% of all emacs users even know EmacsConf exists
|
| maybe 1% know of Sacha Chua, doubt it though, probably
| 0.1% have heard of her
|
| easily over 99% of emacs use is for coding, actually that
| is low, if you snapshotted all emacs sessions in the
| world right now, more like 99.9% of them would be coding
|
| I'm not even sure why this is being debated
| BeetleB wrote:
| Simple: I'm giving you some data points, skewed as they
| may be.
|
| You're providing no data.
|
| And so you're right - there is no debate.
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| telling me someone is a ski instructor is not "data" -
| its trivia
| throwawaysalome wrote:
| [flagged]
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| Agree. Except vim cannot be better editor as emacs can be
| better vim if one likes
| EnigmaCurry wrote:
| > some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It's slow
| and very unreliable.
|
| Over SSH? Did you turn on ssh connection sharing in ssh
| config?
|
| > ControlMaster auto
|
| > ControlPersist yes
|
| > ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%u-%r@%h:%p
|
| massive speedup when you do this, otherwise it starts a new
| connection for every operation.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Tramp is fast for me as well, it did take some work though.
| I had to configure it to use my controlmaster options from
| my ~/.ssh/config, set tramp-verbose to 0, set remote-file-
| name-inhibit-locks to t, and finally set vc-handled-
| backends to just Git. I'm glad I spent the effort to make
| it fast though, because now it's pretty magical.
| softirq wrote:
| Yes, and it's not that it's just slow, it also freezes
| Emacs completely when it borks (and it does bork). I also
| found that none of the emacs terminals could correctly
| display my prompt and I ended up writing a bunch of bash
| conditionals to make my prompt dumber to work in Emacs.
| Just worked out of the box with Vim's :term.
| jamespo wrote:
| Are you using tramp on a LAN or halfway round the world
| with 200ms latency and poor bandwidth?
| erksa wrote:
| Use both heavily. Vim is fantastic for editing one off files.
|
| Emacs on the other hand is fantastic to work on a computer
| for a long period of time. I do use evil mode, as I do think
| it's a much better way to work in a file. Project management,
| magit, org-mode, being able to edit functionality of the
| editor within couple of mins to adjust for an temporary
| change/or indefinitely is what keeps me coming back to emacs.
|
| I've tried vim variations that build in project management
| and all I'm missing from emacs, but left it at some own
| written telescope functions to cover base needs.
|
| Love for both, but to me they are not comparable.
|
| (Maybe because I picked up emacs at the same time a good
| friend picked up vim, and it's been a parallel editor journey
| for 6+ years)
| softirq wrote:
| Vim has terminal support, gdb support built in. We have vim
| plugins maintained by the top Vim plugin specialist for git
| and project management. We have vimwiki, markdown, org mode
| support. We have fuzzy finding, autocomplete, lap support.
| I really don't think you can reasonably tell me you can't
| live in Vim, when I have had the same session open editing
| the linux source tree for like two months now.
| erksa wrote:
| Not disputing that VIM has those things, but I am telling
| you that I can't live in Vim based on your plugin setup.
| But of course, I'm glad there are good crafted ext/plugin
| communities on both sides so we can all can tweak it the
| way we like!
| schemescape wrote:
| Maybe a Vim expert can help me out. I've used Vim for a
| long time, but never with any plugins, and only a few
| lines in my .vimrc.
|
| My problem is that the syntax highlighting, specifically
| for TypeScript is pretty bad. I have a regular expression
| (for parsing front matter) that seems to cause Vim's
| syntax highlighting to go haywire (it stops and sometimes
| crashes).
|
| Is anyone aware of a way to get more reliable syntax
| highlighting in Vim, ideally with a minimum of fuss?
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| using lsp with typescript-language-server?
|
| most of the neovim setup scripts (lazyvim etc) get this
| set up automatically
| schemescape wrote:
| Oh, my initial research (reading the Neovim docs)
| indicated that setting up Neovim would require a lot of
| manual configuration for getting an LSP working. I will
| give it another look, thanks!
|
| Most blog posts I found seemed to assume you already had
| a gigantic custom config, plug-in manager, etc. I
| couldn't find a "how to set up better highlighting and/or
| an LSP for people who know Vim but don't know anything
| about configuration" guide.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| An LSP seems overkill for syntax highlighting? This seems
| more like a treesitter thing.
|
| (Mind you, I have no experience with TypeScript, just
| saying this as a general remark on what those components
| do.)
| papaver wrote:
| would definitely agree. i find tmux + vim does almost
| everything i need. granted i don't try to script anything
| myself. generally there are command line tools or vim plugins
| that do most i want. adding to much gravy to vim also just
| slows vim down which can be incredibly frustrating when one is
| used to typing very fast.
|
| i would say just a couple of years of vim isn't enough to
| really become one with the software. think it took me around 5
| years to really understand why vim is amazing. took me at least
| one year just to get the hang of it properly and be highly
| productive. i can't even type in a normal editor anymore as my
| brain is wired to vim commands. and i still to this day learn
| new commands which make my life easier.
|
| that being said i totally understand why people love emacs. but
| i get a decent amount of the window management stuff just using
| the tmux.
|
| and vi is installed almost everywhere as an editor which makes
| editing in 90% of environments a breeze. even when in windows
| gvim does pretty good.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I am surprised you didn't use evil-mode to emulate the vim
| keybindings. Or was this a an attempt to use "pure" Emacs
| without packages and customization?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option.
|
| Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can
| be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using
| evil.
| kentosi wrote:
| Sorry for the naive question, but if you're changing all
| your bindings to vim, then why use emacs at all? Is there
| any extra functional difference?
| skydhash wrote:
| Emacs is more like an ecosystem around text, so switching
| keybinding does not matter much. And most people's system
| is installed on a single computer, very much like
| Photoshop or Visual Studio. Vim is all about editing text
| and the keybinding are like a DSL for this purpose, so
| changing things will make you awkward everywhere.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| There's a _ton_ more to both editors than just
| keybindings.
|
| See this post[1] where I talk about some of the things
| I've done with emacs -- none of which have anything to do
| with bindings.
|
| You can do millions of other things too, as I'm not using
| emacs nearly to its full capacity. Same with vim.
|
| Bindings in editors are like symbols in math. Yes,
| they're necessary, and you can do a lot with them, but
| symbols are not nearly all there is to math.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35560107
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The clue lies in the fact that you can customize the
| editing experience to function like Vim. Because that's
| one out of a thousand different ways you can customize
| that app to function like a one-off editor, a Git client,
| an email reader, and so on.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > they're not even aware that it was an option
|
| Actually in this case I was - but my goal was to use
| "vanilla" emacs just like I use "vanilla" vi(m). After all,
| if I'm using vi key bindings... why not just use vi?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Both vanilla emacs and vanilla vim are only a tiny
| fraction as powerful as either editor enhanced with
| plugins. You really missed out with this choice.
| ragnese wrote:
| > to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.
|
| As an Emacs user[1], I agree. The flexibility is really cool,
| and there are a handful of Emacs applications (notice I didn't
| call them "packages") that are "killer apps", like Magit, Org-
| Mode, Calc, etc.
|
| But, even though I do use and like Emacs, I can't honestly
| recommend it to anyone and I wouldn't even consider it to be a
| very good programming environment unless you're specifically
| working in a Lisp/Scheme (where it's awesome).
|
| These days, I mostly use Emacs for programming in Rust and for
| using Magit as a git porcelain even when not using Emacs for
| the actual code editing.
|
| Here are the things that suck[2] about Emacs (mostly from the
| point of view of a programming text editor):
|
| * The UI is slow. Don't tell me that it's "only" when we have
| long lines, or too much syntax highlighting or whatever. Sure,
| if I turn off all of the useful programming features, the UI
| updates fast enough for me to not notice any latency, but any
| time I open a file that uses a LSP server or equivalent (not
| just Rust- I've done Clojure, JavaScript, PHP, and C++ in
| Emacs), the latency for even just moving the cursor around is
| noticeable and it's distracting.
|
| * Tramp sucks. I don't understand how everyone says that Tramp
| is awesome and magical. Every single time I've tried to use it
| to do anything, it's been a bad experience. It's been a few
| years since I've even tried it, but I remember having to
| wrestle with ssh-agent authentication, some packages not
| playing nicely with it (besides the "obvious" ones like LSP-
| mode), and the whole application hanging if the Tramp session
| hung for some reason.
|
| * It's actually really HARD to customize properly. The experts
| say that Emacs is "self-documenting" and "introspectable", but
| many times, I'll try to customize some behavior or a keymap or
| something, and I'll read the documentation for a variable or
| function and it'll say something like "takes a plist of FOO
| definitions,"--well, what the heck does a "FOO" definition look
| like? What are the keys for the plist? What are acceptable
| values for those keys? It's very common to just have to dig
| through the actual elisp code to find out. Then, you'll find
| out that your customization doesn't even work correctly because
| some other mode or function stomps on your code, or gets
| initialized in a different logic path that isn't affected by
| your change. Since every feature and every package is
| different, you have little chance of just figuring out a few
| conventions or any standard structure for packages.
|
| * Handling buffers is tedious. Sometimes buffers appear and
| take over the whole frame, sometimes they split the frame and
| steal focus, and sometimes they split the frame and don't steal
| focus. And it's very ad-hoc and tedious to try to separate out
| "background, system buffers" from "my actual work buffers".
| There are tons of Emacs packages that attempt to make it easier
| to manage buffers, switch between them more easily, group them
| in lists, etc.
|
| Like I said, I _like_ Emacs. But, I also run Linux on my
| personal machines and run a de-Googled AOSP ROM on my rooted
| Android phone. UX, polish, and convenience are obviously not a
| high priority for me.
|
| [1]: I've used Emacs to varying degrees and with varying levels
| of dedication and hardcore-ness since 2008-ish. At a few
| points, I would've said that I was pretty competent/proficient
| in Elisp, and have authored some fairly elaborate functions to
| help me with common tasks within Emacs. I even use to try to do
| a version of "literate programming" with org-mode and org-mode
| babel blocks in place of something like Jupyter notebooks for
| Python.
|
| [2]: Yes, this is a very negative comment, but I tend to
| complain loudest about the things that I love and care about. I
| don't complain or criticize things that I don't like or don't
| want to use.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Handling buffers is tedious.
|
| I feel the pain. I often daydream about spending time
| customizing it to my needs, and add that to the other 576
| ways I want to customize it and don't have time.
|
| And then I sigh and remind myself "At least it's better than
| tabs!" before I return to my tasks at hand.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I love emacs, but agree with many of your criticisms.
|
| Emacs can be slow. I don't use LSP, so can't comment on that,
| but it's definitely slow on long lines with syntax
| highlighting.
|
| I don't use TRAMP for exactly one of the reasons you
| mentioned: it can hang Emacs. I want to avoid that at all
| costs, because I pretty much live in Emacs.
|
| Emacs' default handling of windows (in emacs terminology it's
| "windows", not "buffers" that you're talking about) is
| painful, but you can improve that through various packages,
| like popper[1]
|
| Depending on what problems you run in to and your skill
| level, it could be tricky to debug elisp programs. However,
| compare that to when you run in to some bug in VSCode... how
| are you going to debug that? You'll probably have to submit a
| bug report and wait for the developers to get to it (if they
| ever do)... how is that better than emacs?
|
| Also, remember that you don't have to go it alone in
| troubleshooting the issues you run in to with emacs. There's
| a whole community ready and willing to help.
|
| Despite the downsides of emacs, I still use and love it.
| Every editor has downsides, and emacs is no exception. Its
| positives far, far outweigh the negatives for me. There's
| just so much more that it can do than other editors, and it's
| far more customizable. I very much doubt I'll ever seriously
| consider switching to another.
|
| [1] - https://github.com/karthink/popper
| ithrow wrote:
| I have love/hate relationship with Emacs too, but for the
| stuff I do in Emacs I hate other software more. So Emacs it
| is.
| juped wrote:
| Emacs is an operating system, not an editor; I'm really not
| sure why Stallman constantly promoted the "emacs vs. vi" meme.
|
| You might as well try to switch from Notepad to Linux. It's
| just a type error, and you'll have a bad time.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Emacs is an operating system
|
| Reminds me of an old joke: "Emacs would be a great OS, if
| only it came with a decent text editor..."
| 0zemp1c wrote:
| > Emacs is an operating system, not an editor
|
| what does it take for this tired and false meme to die?
| Y_Y wrote:
| Ok, it doesnt have a kernel full of hardware drivers or an
| implementation that runs on bare metal. That said, it
| covers a lot of userland and things otherwise covered by a
| Desktop Environment (which are often conflated with OSes).
| In terms of application hosting, window management, low-
| level system control, etc. and the fact that some brave
| souls have had success with running emacs as PID 1 means
| that it's not a million miles away from being an OS.
|
| (And that's without the inevitable implementation of some
| basic OS functions in elisp by various wizards)
| abudabi123 wrote:
| (global-set-key (kbd "M-<tab>") #'completion-at-point-
| using-chatgpt)
| suetoniusp91 wrote:
| Making a new account to post a pithy pedantic negative
| reply is usually a indicator of irl issues that need to be
| addressed. The parent is not wrong in his point that
| comparing vi to emacs is the proverbial apples to oranges.
| They are different types of tools
| eequah9L wrote:
| Not an operating system, more like a desktop environment.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| For the EMACS guru's in this thread I have a question.
|
| How practical is EMACS for a non-programmer? My preferred
| environment is FreeBSD + i3WM. I'm a sysadmin, I have no
| programming skills so anything beyond tweaking the odd
| configuration file is of no interest to me.
|
| I know that being able to write elisp is a major component of
| using emacs, but how usable is it without being able to write
| your own programs?
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Actually, what's the fuss about Emacs being so good? I'm a
| hardcore vim user to the point that I've installed Vimium for
| browsers, use vim on my iPad as well.
|
| Someone please enlighten me with links, guides or just a comment
| as to what's in Emacs that makes it productive and special.
| throwawaysalome wrote:
| Plenty of google-able info to answer your question. But to wax
| poetic for a moment, you may think of vim as chess and emacs as
| baduk. You can learn chess quickly, and the game goes as deep
| as you're willing to go. Absorbing baduk takes significantly
| more time, but once you get it, it's like peering into another
| dimension.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > baduk
|
| (for people who don't know it by this name: this is
| apparently the Korean name of the board game Go.)
| teddyh wrote:
| Start with the official Emacs Tour:
| https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/
| psd1 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/
|
| There's a lot of non-emacs filler but it's still the best emacs
| e-zine
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I'd love to give it another try, but not convinced it's a good
| fit for me. Love it conceptually though.
|
| The stumbling block I usually come to is wondering how to utilize
| these data sets on my smartphone in an efficient and effective
| manner.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| It does only work for a subset of org-mode functionality, but
| for TODOs and similar I find Orgzly on Android works great. I
| sync between my laptop and phone via Syncthing.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Wow! That's exactly what I hoped for. That's lovely looking.
| ctur wrote:
| I find the iOS app BeOrg great for mobile access to my org mode
| inbox. It works well as not only a place to write quick notes
| but also to, say, "share to" links from Safari and other apps
| to create inbox entries as well to quickly capture URLs to view
| later.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| I use emacs from termux frequently, even better if I use my
| bluetooth keyboard and hdmi out to a tv, but even though the
| text is small in normal mode I still prefer it to any of the
| fdroid emacs or org mode packages.
|
| For those who worry about runaway configs, I highly suggest
| starting with sanemacs for a good minimal configuration you can
| start with and build from a good foundation on.
| xphos wrote:
| How did you collect such detailed statistics of your usage that's
| the crazy part in my opinion not that you actually switch but you
| have the statistics to monitor the switch!
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| If you've done any significant amount of contract work you get
| used to logging your time for multiple clients. Arguably you
| then grow wiser and charge per day.
| slashdev wrote:
| Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and
| intellij?
|
| I've heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be
| honest. They're more like rationalizations for why they stick to
| what they know.
|
| I just don't get it. Why use inferior tools?
|
| Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It's
| nothing compared to your salary.
|
| Both _may_ let you type slightly faster and move around faster.
| Maybe. But that's not the bottleneck anyway.
|
| Why? Am I missing something or is it just an irrational
| attachment to software they learned long ago and prefer to stick
| with rather than learn something new?
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| You seem to be missing that they're not actually inferior
| tools. I can't think of a single thing that can't be done at
| least approximately as easily with emacs than with VSCode and
| the like.
| slashdev wrote:
| Are they really? Do you get all the same plugins, all the
| lints and hover info, refactoring, jump to usages/definition,
| smart auto complete, etc?
|
| They seem awfully limited to me by comparison.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
|
| Or
|
| https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig
|
| https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp
|
| No different than installing plugins in VSCode for
| completions, they all work via calling out to a LSP server
| using https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/
|
| When you don't understand something it's only natural to be
| unaware of its capabilities, yes.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > They seem awfully limited to me by comparison.
|
| Can you list your most important feature(s) in chosen your
| ide or editor that you suspect emacs doesn't have or can't
| easily have?
| slashdev wrote:
| How about the intellij inspections? It's a ton of lints
| that underline bits of your code as you type, with a wavy
| line, and you can hover over it to see what the problem
| is, and even potentially fix it automatically. Is there
| anything like that in the emacs world?
| nequo wrote:
| The ESS package ("Emacs Speaks Statistics") does
| something like that for R without using an LSP.
|
| `lsp-ui` does it for Rust at the very least but probably
| for other languages too.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Things you can do inside emacs (and have all this be tightly
| integrated so you can copy and edit data seamlessly from one
| "application" to another, without leaving your editor):
|
| - browse the web
|
| - read/send/edit email, RSS news, usenet
|
| - chat on IRC and other chat networks/protocols
|
| - use org-mode to edit notes in an outline format with
| hyperlinks, executable code blocks, a spreadsheet, etc
|
| - use magit, one of the most powerful git interfaces
|
| - read and edit PDFs and LaTeX with visual LaTeX symbol
| substitution right in the editor
|
| - program and configure the editor in elisp, with a whole elisp
| ecosystem used for every plugin (this alone would make me
| switch away from any other editor to emacs)
|
| - use thousands of other scripts and plugins that are the
| result of 50 years of development
|
| - absolutely everything customizable to the nth degree, as
| emacs is more of an editor construction kit than a mere editor
| anikom15 wrote:
| Why waste time learning about some fad IDE that will get
| replaced by something 'better' in five years? Newer text
| editors don't do anything better than Vim, and they are
| strictly worse when it comes to their primary function: editing
| text.
|
| 'You can install a vi emulator.' - Waste of time. I already
| have vim.
|
| My vimrc file still works. New machine? Just install vim and
| copy my vimrc over.
|
| Emacs is a totally different experience. Emacs is essentially
| the interface side of an operating system. There is really no
| replacement for it except a UNIX command-line with a bunch of
| CLI tools for things like news and email that people have
| forgotten about.
| lezojeda wrote:
| [dead]
| gshulegaard wrote:
| I think I would rephrase this question as why would I stop
| using emacs for VS code and intellij? Seriously, there is no
| feature they have that my emacs config doesn't (AFAICT after
| using Intellij and VS code each for 4+ years). But I have the
| ability to work with emacs without ever touching my mouse. You
| may consider that only being "slightly" faster, but every time
| I use VS code, _feel_ slow because I know how fast I would have
| been in emacs.
|
| Combine this with my tiling window manager and I pretty much
| only have to use my mouse to interact with web browsers. That's
| the killer feature that makes VS Code and Intellij _feel_
| inferior to me.
|
| Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that VSCode and Intellij are
| _actually_ inferior to Emacs. I think both are great in their
| own right, but after years of familiarity I have a fluency with
| Emacs (because of the keyboard oriented interface) that I could
| never have with them.
|
| To be fair, for someone without emacs fluency I would probably
| steer them towards VSCode and Intellij as they are definitely
| more approachable. In fact, I have done exactly that for
| several of my friends and colleagues.
| slashdev wrote:
| The no mouse thing is one of the best arguments I've heard.
| I'm not convinced it makes it worthwhile, but I'm willing to
| grant it's possible.
| KryDos wrote:
| I don't think the fact that Vim and Emacs were created a long
| time ago makes them inferior.
|
| They keep developing and they are up to date with many/all
| programming-features. There are bunch of extensions that VScode
| just doesn't have despite it's huge extension store.
|
| Also the main thing for me about these editors and especially
| Emacs is that you can program it. Not just configure it but
| actually program and do anything with it. You can hook into any
| piece of the code and change it. You can read the source code
| of any "extension" and patch it on the fly. I don't think I'm
| aware of any other editors that allow that.
|
| It's huge power.
| slashdev wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not saying the problem is they were created
| long ago.
|
| I'm saying (from my pov, which may be wrong) that they don't
| seem to have as good of an IDE experience. Certainly the out-
| of-the-box experience with emacs/vim is much worse. And the
| learning investment is pretty steep. But even if you
| configure everything as an expert would, the experience still
| seems lacking to me.
| throwawaysalome wrote:
| The argument for vi is easily made. UNIX devs are constantly
| diving in and out of directories, grepping, awking, and
| otherwise spot checking code at the shell prompt. A terminal-
| based editor emulsifies coding and such command line
| activities. The argument for emacs is less easily made, and its
| dwindling market share evidences that. If you're a black belt
| in elisp like I am, all other editors seem unusable. But you're
| right. If I hadn't already spent years mastering emacs, I'd
| likely not give emacs so much as a look.
| slashdev wrote:
| That's another good argument. Once you've invested the time
| learning everything about emacs, that's not a barrier to
| using it anymore, it actually kind of locks you in, since you
| won't have that level of familiarity in VS code or intellij
| (and anyway, they're not as friendly to modify.)
| todd8 wrote:
| In grad school in the 80's I used Emacs. At home around 1984 I
| got my first PC running MSDOS. For years I used a commercial
| product that used Emacs keybindings (Epsilon) because Emacs
| wouldn't run on my PC.
|
| When I went to work at IBM I was disappointed that concerns over
| the Gnu license forced me to use vi for a few years, but I
| discovered it to be great an editor for me.
|
| I eventually was drawn back to Emacs and now, many years later, I
| enjoy playing with my config file every week. There is always
| something new to be added.
|
| It's org mode and magit that make it impossible to leave Emacs.
| (Right now I'm experimenting with a configuration where I've
| installed the top 600 most popular add on packages at once. I'm
| kind of using the wisdom of crowds approach to picking packages
| this time. Next week it will be something else.)
| pyrophane wrote:
| > Poof I made my free-time disappear
|
| - Ellis Kenyo, on being called an "elisp mage"
|
| Haha, this is exactly what I fear if I tried to switch from
| Neovim to Emacs. I have a pretty bare-bones Emacs config that I
| started a while back, but haven't spent the time to really get it
| going.
| goldfeld wrote:
| Maybe Doom Emacs can win me back, I ended up preferring the vim
| emulation mode in Emacs, evil, over nvim but my dotfiles
| bitrotted over the long years
| codr7 wrote:
| Yeah, thanks a lot, I just lost two hours setting up and
| configuring EXWM.
|
| Very cool, makes me wonder why I didn't think of this before,
| I've been using Emacs since forever.
| bitwize wrote:
| > As I said, I started from the point of zero experience with
| Lisp. I had a degree in software engineering, but I don't feel
| like it has helped me in any direct sense. At most, it exposed me
| to different kinds and concepts of programming, but I am
| confident that it's anything but a prerequisite, as also shown by
| the story of Protesilaos.
|
| A reminder that back in the late 1970s, secretaries at MIT who
| knew nothing about programming were using Lisp to customize
| Multics Emacs to their liking and workflow -- and Emacs was far
| less convenient then than it is now!
|
| The weird trick they used was, telling the secretaries they were
| just customizing their editor, not programming it!
| kaveh808 wrote:
| A few random Emacs thoughts...
|
| One really nice feature of MacOS text widgets is the inclusion of
| basic Emacs key bindings such as C-k, C-d, C-a, etc. Brought
| forward from the Next days.
|
| I used Zmacs on Lisp Machines back at MIT in the early 80's. A
| couple of my favorite Emacs-related acronyms are the editor EINE
| (Eine Is Not Emacs) and its successor ZWEI (Zwei Was EINE
| Initially).
|
| I remember at one point in the late 80's using Emacs in the shell
| on SGI Irix workstations. No mouse support at that time for it.
|
| Today I still use Emacs/Slime for my Common Lisp 3D graphics
| hacking.
| camgunz wrote:
| This website is a treasure trove of emacs config goodness.
| Bookmarked to come back to to explore switching from vim once
| again.
| [deleted]
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs a couple of months ago.
|
| I've been using ChatGPT (GPT-4) to help me write config (~1,000
| lines of elisp code so far) and it's been very interesting/fun.
| I'm not going back.
| bachback wrote:
| very cool can you share more?
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's interesting. I've asked Bing Chat and ChatGPT several
| times to write me elisp code, and _not once_ did it work well.
| It often invents APIs.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Hm, I've had luck with openai gpt4. I've had it make fake
| APIs before, but usually when I say "fooFakeApi doesn't
| exist" it corrects itself.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| But how well does it do on elisp?
| BeetleB wrote:
| When I've informed it of fake APIs, it apologizes, and
| replaces it with another fake API.
| newtwilly wrote:
| I recently had GPT 3.5 write me a function for translating
| the number under point to an ISO timestamp. It handled
| whether the epoch number was milliseconds or seconds since
| epoch. I kinda had to iterate on it and ask it to do some
| things different, but it never wrote invalid code.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| the .vimrc I've been using for like 7 years has 8 lines
| taw28 wrote:
| My emacs config is zero lines.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Respect. What do you use it for?
| prashp wrote:
| That's the thing, he doesn't
| adamc wrote:
| I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before
| that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's
| certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over
| time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are
| often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange.
|
| I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.
| tpmx wrote:
| I've used emacs for 25+ years. I was never into LISP; I just
| _really_ liked the interface. And muscle memory goes deep.
|
| Two months ago I switched to VSCode. The "Awesome Emacs Keymap"
| extension by Yuichiro Tachibana made it possible:
|
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tuttieee...
|
| It's not 100% perfect, but close enough. I'm quite enjoying
| using VSCode now. It's fantastic having a wealth of actually
| user-friendly features/extensions to choose from.
|
| VSCode is so annoyingly cluttered/blinking/animating/popup-
| infested by default though. There are a lot of things to
| disable in the default config.
| tpmx wrote:
| The incremental search behavior still trips me up; it sorta
| works but not exactly.
|
| Then there are a few crucial key bindings missing (like
| creating and closing split windows) - that seems doable
| without changing the core VSCode behavior.
| cyrialize wrote:
| I'm in the same boat - I've used it almost daily for 7ish years
| at this point. It's so much fun to use and customize, but there
| are easier options out there.
|
| When people find out I use Emacs I always caution them against
| using it. It's taken me a long, long time to be productive in
| Emacs. VSCode, JetBrains tools, etc. don't have the same
| requirement and start up time to productivity.
|
| Buying into Emacs does give you a lot though! Emacs way of
| splitting panels, going through buffers, going through files,
| always feel better than other applications for me.
| tpmx wrote:
| > Emacs way of splitting panels, going through buffers, going
| through files, always feel better than other applications for
| me.
|
| Yes!
|
| Some of the people who built GNU Emacs were legit UX
| geniuses.
| adamc wrote:
| It does. And the editor design, where almost everything of
| significance is just a function you can call/advise etc. from
| user code, makes it the most supple editor on earth. That's
| why I'm still there. But...
|
| Pretty huge learning curve to adopt it.
| crabbone wrote:
| [flagged]
| SettembreNero wrote:
| > I haven't met anyone who used VSCode / MSVS / IntelliJ
| products or Eclipse who was good at writing code.
|
| How many people have you met?
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