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I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why vscode?
I’ve seen this pop up a lot lately—someone who’s been using Emacs or Vim for years and then sees the “new cool” editor and says they’ll be switching to it. I have the same question, since someone who’s used Emacs for that long would surely have “seen the light” already. Maybe they’re yak shaving with the config instead of getting work done? That’s one of the few valid complaints I can think of.
Note that I use the graphical interface to Emacs and would've left Emacs many years ago if itworked only inside the terminal environment. I'm guessing you prefer to work in the terminal environment.
Many people don't realize it, but Emacs has been able to act somewhat like a native GTK+ app, a native Mac app or an native Windows app since the early 1990s. "somewhat": right clicking does something idiosyncratic (namely, if there is already an selection, the click causes the start or the end of the selection to move to the site of the click, which is behavior I've not seen in any other GUI; the standard behavior of course being to pop up a contextual menu, which by the way is what I adjusted my Emacs to do by writing about 100 lines of Emacs Lisp code) but left clicking moves the insertion point to the site of the click (the conventional behavior on Mac and Windows) and dragging the mouse does the conventional thing, too.
I like the "just the fact" nature of the terminal environment, but I also like pointing devices. Emacs and vscode (and Plan 9, but Plan 9 has problems that prevented me from ever spending much time there) constitute a happy middle ground between the terminal environment and the overly chaotic environments of Mac apps in general, Windows apps in general and the web. I have yet to see vscode's being used intensively (like Emacs is being used) for tasks other than programming, but would be delighted if vscode or maybe some platform derived from vscode were to start being used like that.
Maybe I will be the first one to write a really popular vscode extension designed for some purpose other than programming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve seen this pop up a lot lately—someone who’s been using Emacs or Vim for years and then sees the “new cool” editor and says they’ll be switching to it. I have the same question, since someone who’s used Emacs for that long would surely have “seen the light” already. Maybe they’re yak shaving with the config instead of getting work done? That’s one of the few valid complaints I can think of.
I used Emacs for a couple of decades but switched over to VS Code after a couple of days of playing with it. I love Emacs and the concept of infinite configurability. But as it turns out, I don't actually use most of that flexibility. It's more common that I'll install a package, tweak a couple of knobs, and get on with work. Well, VS Code offers the equivalents of all the Emacs packages that I actually use, and they…
I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.
I love Emacs! I just wish it had a decent text editor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve seen this pop up a lot lately—someone who’s been using Emacs or Vim for years and then sees the “new cool” editor and says they’ll be switching to it. I have the same question, since someone who’s used Emacs for that long would surely have “seen the light” already. Maybe they’re yak shaving with the config instead of getting work done? That’s one of the few valid complaints I can think of.
I admit that I have spent a lot of time adjusting Emacs to my preferences (by writing Emacs Lisp code that gets loaded automatically every time my Emacs starts). I am not particularly unhappy about that fact however and will probably spend a lot of time writing code that runs inside vscode if it becomes my daily driver. Note that I use the graphical interface to Emacs and would've left Emacs many years ago if itworke…
Emacs does that in X11 because that is (or at least was) the standard behavior for text selection in X11. Emacs is simply conforming to the environment it is running within.
I wish I spent time learning how to use Emacs in the past to a degree where customizing my installation was faster than learning something else. As I stand now, it seems really hard to justify to invest time into it when the benefits over using something very easy to work with (like JetBrains IDEs for Java or VS Code for Python) sound marginal. I know experts can fly around in it and it looks amazing. Having a single…
I am so glad that I took the time to learn emacs during my uni days more than ten years ago. I would see everyone else using absolutely awful IDEs that they never actually understood while I was learning how everything really worked and setting up emacs to make my life easier. Nowadays I see people struggling with slightly less bad tools like VSCode and they often ask me about emacs but they just don't have the time…
I'm really happy to see Emacs move faster, and especially the integration of package management since version 25. The old beast is still kicking! For what it's worth, I've actually been using on macOS the Mituharu branch [1], available in MacPorts as "emacs-mac-app". This version adds the [s]essential[/s] smooth-scrolling feature, and just in general seems to be slightly better integrated into macOS (except that it d…
Emacs is the one environment that I've been a fan of from afar. I recognize the brilliance and power of it, but a few things have always kept me away from using it on the Mac. And I've put in serious attempts, including going emacs-only, then a custom evil mode, then spacemacs - - The server mode compatibility with the way Mac applications are set up. I'd ideally want an emacs server running in the background, and a…
Worth double-checking, but I think that's one area Mituharu's is better than standard Emacs. I definitely recall some font rendering issues with some past version.
As for your other points, they aren't resolved. FWIW, I work around them:
> The server mode compatibility
I just have one long-running Emacs session. I have some colleagues who have experimented with using a launchd LaunchAgent to start emacs server in the background when they login. I haven't kept up with their results and I don't know if there are any side-effects.
> "Windows" (or Frames?) have generally not worked seamlessly for me
Since I have a long-running session, this isn't much of a problem for me. That said, when I do start up Emacs on first login, it indeed takes upwards of 5 seconds to startup, including a window re-themeing and resizing. It's not great, but like I said, it's only once at startup for me. Furthermore, because I came from a tiling window manager on Linux (AwesomeWM), I required similar behavior on macOS. I use SizeUp [1] with shortcuts configured to move my windows to side/corners of the screen. It's far from being as good as a true tiling window manager, but I've had to be satisfied with what I can get.
[1] https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ (there are alternatives like Moom)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why vscode?
I’ve seen this pop up a lot lately—someone who’s been using Emacs or Vim for years and then sees the “new cool” editor and says they’ll be switching to it. I have the same question, since someone who’s used Emacs for that long would surely have “seen the light” already. Maybe they’re yak shaving with the config instead of getting work done? That’s one of the few valid complaints I can think of.