Ask HN: Should I learn Emacs in 2022? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Emacs in 2022?

#11

Post by Jtsummers » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

"Should"? It's up to you. If you're interested in it then go for it. My suggestion is to:

1. Run through the tutorial (built-in)

2. Try out org-mode

3. Try out magit

I've been using emacs for 20 years, but those two things are what will keep me using emacs, even if I pull up another editor or IDE for programming sometimes.

4. Try out evil-mode for vim keybindings (since you already know vim).

elisp (no hyphen) isn't bad, it's actually a decent lisp (this part is opinion) now that lexical scope are the default instead of dynamic scope. Performance has improved with the recent work to add JIT compilation, as well. I really have only two gripes about the language, but they aren't going to stop me from using it: I wish elisp had real modules/packages for namespacing things, and that it had better concurrency support.

I don't get the RSI thing, you do use control a lot, but I found mapping that to caps lock made it a lot more comfortable, plus I never use caps lock as caps lock anyways. But if you switch on evil-mode, you'll avoid most of the chords while editing text anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Emacs in 2022?

#12

Post by hulitu » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

1. You need 2 hands for emacs. 2. You need to choose between XEmacs or GNUEmacs 3. You need to be able to count parantheses.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Emacs in 2022?

#13

Post by haakonhr » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

tharne wrote: post #9

> Is learning emacs worth it? Yes. Especially now that you know vim. Using evil mode, in combination with leader keys (see Doom Emacs or Spacemacs) resolves the RSI issues that have caused emacs users so much trouble in the past. A lot of folks will tell you that learning and using emacs will not make you a better programmer. I disagree - it will certainly make you a better programmer if you put the time into learnin…

This is a very good reason. After a few years using emacs and at some point reading the introduction to elisp book (included in emacs), slowly building up my config I now write small snippets here. The fact that you can evaluate everything everywhere also makes it easy to play around and incrementally test your way to the desired outcome. The "creator mindset" have made me way more comfortable digging into code bases in general when for example trying to grok sparsely documented features of open source libraries.

Also, magit! It is one of the few pieces of software that makes me happy. It also taught me git, which really is a force multiplier when used properly (or consistently).

This being said. I also see that it could be a lot of work to get emacs up to par with for example PyCharm for web apps.

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Emacs in 2022?

#14

Post by smlavine » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

I'll go against the grain. Probably not. If you already "have a good setup for programming already", then I think the gains in productivity for you would be minimal, and you might even lose productivity with the time it takes you to transition to Emacs.

I used Emacs for a few years. At first I just used it as a TUI text editor. Then I started using it as an GUI IDE, browsing the web, as a full blown window manager/desktop environment with exwm...the thing that happens with Emacs, is that once you start using it for one thing, you start using it for everything, even when there are better options available. You might end up boxing yourself in. Personally, I am more happy using the wide world of programs available out there that aren't written in Emacs Lisp.

But if it's for fun, then do what you want, y'know?

Re: Ask HN: Should I learn Emacs in 2022?

#15

Post by django77 » Thu, Mar 17, 2022, 8:24 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #8

Really only you can answer that question. If you're curious enough, take a deep dive some weekend and see if Emacs is right for you. As for how bad Emacs Lisp is, it's really only bad compared to other Lisps . And this can be mitigated by enabling lexical scoping and using some of the Common Lisp features that have been ported to Emacs Lisp. It's still a tremendously powerful environment to program in. That said, I d…

This is not necessarily the case for every programming language. Plenty of them are first-class citizens in Emacs and only decent in VS Code, languages like Clojure and Haskell come to mind, and I'm guessing pretty much every LISP.

VS Code is probably a pragmatic choice if you want to start coding right away and don't care about any customization, but if someone is interested in productivity and efficiency, Emacs should be considered (along with other high-performing tools).