Sublime Text 3.0

You are right. I view emacs as a sort of religion or philosophy of computing. I don't use the metaphor lightly. It is pretty apt. It is my religion, so I would never put it on anyone else. I will share the cool stuff about it, but not in an annoying way.

The philosophy of using it is that eventually, in the long long term, the productivity gains should be reasonable or at least competitive with any other editor or environment. It should be a joy to use. Since I know I will probably only ever make a living crafting text I view it as an imperative to deeply master my primary tool. The other aspect is that it is free and old and stable. I can't ever achieve an RMS level of using open source things, but everywhere I can, I want the truly open thing, even if it isn't practical. I run Linux for this reason, even though it was a giant time sink making it behave and getting everything just so. But I can make things just so.

This fits in also with creating a distraction free environment. i3wm, emacs, I barely even see application menus these days, but I still use a GUI, I am not crazy. But it fits with my philosophy/religion of computing, so I am going to do it this way. If others agree, great. If they want to know about it, I will share. If they think it's crazy, from their perspective they may be right!

>That said, and I hate to be this guy (not really), but... Emacs?

I intentionally didn't include console editors, totally different beasts. Never used emacs, only learned vim and only touched the surface, mostly use it when I ssh to remote machines. The pinnacle of flexibility and responsiveness but the learning curve... it's just too much for me.

You're right though, it's a great investment and as the years pass and mouse usage takes its toll on my right hand fingers, keyboard only editors look even more appealing. Whenever though I sit down and try to code in vim I find my productivity plummeting. I know once I ride the curve things will improve but unfortunately I find it hard to persevere

I try such distros every two years or so to see if it's gotten any better. Usually it's not worth my time from the start (fun thing is, I used to use Emacs for a year or so in uni, before turning to Vim and never looking back -- until I had to do Java, which meant Eclipse. I got back to Vim, but the last 5 years it's all ST with some sporadic attempts to like VSC).

Let's do this in realtime. I downloaded the latest Spacemacs.

1) Opening. Hmm, it's a zip not a DMG. Already losing me, but I'll stick, I'm not that shallow.

2) Hmm, it's just a bunch of source files? I guess the prominent "Download" link just gives you the configuration, not a bundled editor. I have to get Emacs from somewhere else. Grr... Lemme check their "Quickstart".

3) Yeah... the Quickstart link just gives you some BS that assumes you already know how to install this, and the "Install" button just gives a git command line to clone their repo. Back to square 1.

4) Fuck it, I'll use brew to install Emacs. Spacemacs doesn't even say which version of Emacs it works best with. I'll risk with what brew gives me.

5) Brew installation ends fine, with a caveat: "Please try the Cask for a better-supported Cocoa version". Now you tell me?

6) Anyway, I have an emacs, lemme git clone spacemacs now. OK, comes up, nice logo. Now, I have a huge emacs window -- so why is it asking me "first time" config questions in a tiny space at the bottom? And why doesn't it explain better what the various options (distro flavors) entail?

7) Let it do its install, then play around a bit. Close the window in evil mode (q!). I open emacs again, greeted with this:

  Found 1 new package(s) to install...
  --> refreshing package archive: gnu... [3/3]
  --> installing package: evil-unimpaired@spacemacs-evil... [1/1]
  An error occurred while installing evil-unimpaired (error: (wrong-type-
  argument package-desc nil))

Oh, and:

  Warnings:
    - Cannot find any of the specified fonts (Source Code Pro)! Font settings 
    may not be correct.      

8) I open some local source files to check. A buffer window appears on the right side with "warnings":

  Error (use-package): helm :config: Symbol’s value as 
  variable is void: helm-bookmark-map

Yeah, fuck that. Back to ST3.

> even something seemingly simple like syntax highlighting can be surprisingly complex

I was troubleshooting something with a colleague who was using Atom, and every time he opened a new file, it'd take somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds before the syntax highlighting was applied. As someone who's in and out of files all day, that'd drive me bananas.

I'd recommend this even for non-emacs users who use terminals a lot. The tiny bit of extra comfort from ctrl-C in a shell alone is worth it. Add in tmux ctrl-B, or any readline shortcuts you use a lot, and you're onto a winner.