IRC and Emacs all the things

I gave Emacs another good-faith effort recently, via Spacemacs. I really bought into it, wanted to make it work, and forced myself to use it for all text editing. But despite every intention of working through all of the quirks and oddities and endless customization, and with the stated goal of reaching Emacs enlightenment, I gave up after a month or so, deleted it from my machine and resolved never to try again.

It feels silly saying this about a piece of time-tested software that many people love, but as someone who believes in the idea of Emacs, in my opinion the reality of Emacs is that it just doesn't work very well. It's slow, it's clunky, it gets in your way at every opportunity, it's documented in a very puzzling style, the add-on packages often interfere with each other in inscrutable ways, and the user experience is on the whole, terrible.

At least that's how I felt coming back to Emacs after using modern IDEs the past few years.

I'm using a similar setup and for similar reasons, particularly for XMPP, but finding it hard to recommend to others because of the awkward bits involved (and because not everyone uses/prefers Emacs, of course). It's mostly okay for basic textual messages over a stable connection, though even then an IRC client is likely to split outgoing messages assuming an IRC message length limit. But when it comes to anything more advanced (e.g., file transfer), less visible (e.g., proper connection closing), or requiring a more advanced UI, it leads to compromises at multiple stages: similarly to just bridging protocols in general, but with addition of bitlbee/libpurple API restrictions.

Sometimes I wonder whether the situation would be better with specialized CLI IM clients running inside Emacs's shell mode: it works well for telnet MUDs, at least.

Agreed. I started with Spacemacs, which showed what is possible in Emacs. But it is so horribly slow and breaks so often that I couldn't use it more than a few weeks. Then I started with a blank init.el and just added packages (with use-package) as needed. Now it's fast and it still has the functionality that I need, things also rarely break (and thanks to Nix I can always roll back). The main idea that I stole from Spacemacs is the use of spacebar shortcuts (via general.el).

It is an accurate and absolutely fair assessment (from a perspective of someone new to Emacs), and I wouldn't even try to convince you otherwise. Probably nobody has ever fallen in love with Emacs right away after trying it for the first time. There's no "honeymoon period" with Emacs, and there's no "Learn Emacs in 21 days."

Getting Emacs is a journey. For me, it took years to get to the point where I discovered just enough of it to say with absolute certainty. In essence, there's simply no other software product in human history that has that level of extensibility.

Oh, I was not too fond of it in the beginning. I hated people praising it all the time. I hated watching people doing some mind-blowing tricks of text manipulation or some other productivity stunts. Just like you, I've deleted it with a promise never to try it again. But unlike you, I reinstalled, tried, and angrily deleted it again, and did that numerous times.

Before Emacs, I've used several different editors and IDEs - from Borland Delphi and C++Builder and a bunch of different versions of Visual Studio to Sublime Text, Atom, Vim, and finally IntelliJ. OMG, I loved IntelliJ. I used it for about seven years quite extensively. I used it to the point where it became my hobby to find some poorly documented features of it. I've submitted a ton of requests on YouTrack for improvements and bugs I found. I still get email notifications for those of them that never got addressed, yet people see them and upvote them, even after so many years.

Somehow, my curiosity kept bringing me back to Emacs. Luckily, every so often, I would meet someone who'd show me some cool Emacs stuff, and that would make me angry again - "am I really so stupid that I can never understand this piece of s... oftware?" Countless times I would try to "fix" my Emacs config, because "why this shit doesn't work?".

At some point, I had to keep at least three different things open all the time - IntelliJ (my main driver), Sublime/Atom/Vim, and Emacs. And one day I decided - I have to do something about it. There was too much frustration from context switching. And since I already knew IntelliJ very well, I decided to give Emacs a serious stress-test.

I promised myself that for one week, I would try to use Emacs and only it. And whenever I would need to do something, I would find a way to do that in Emacs and ignore my temptation to go back to the warmth of my cozy IDE. The first week was tough, but I survived. The second week was exhausting. After a few weeks, I was almost comfortable. I kept downloading and installing IntelliJ EAPs for some reason, maybe out of fear that one day Emacs would break so badly that I would have to abandon it again. Or maybe because I was sure, one day I will find that pretty major thing that Emacs just can't do. Oh boy, I've proven to be wrong. Over and over again. It turned out - not only Emacs could do anything I needed, it would do it better. A few months later I got a new job, a new computer. And at some point, I realized that I've never installed IntelliJ, but I'm still very happy. I have outgrown it.

- "Cool story, bro," you might say, "but how does that help me?"

I don't know the definitive answer. Emacs is an incredibly hard sell to uninitiated. You have to be tenacious. But I know for sure - learning Emacs is absolutely worth the initial pain and suffering.

> "opinionated"

I feel this term might need to be officially dead and buried. If something as customizable as emacs is deemed opinionated what does this even mean? For chrissakes there are people that consider emacs to be a better vi implementation than vim.