Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a carpenter saying, "I don't want to master my tools, I just want to build things."
How common is it for carpenters to make their own tools? I actually don't know!
Did you write Emacs? Did I write Emacs?
The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
61–70 of 267 posts
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#62Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…
> Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS.
That assumes that using it as an editor is the main reason we use it.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#63Every so often I would start my Emacs config over from scratch. I might port over some old defuns from the previous, eventually, but I would always endeavour to try the latest tools and best language configurations. Consistently I found myself using Emacs and sticking to it because it offered the best developer experience. And then came Microsoft's Language Server Protocol. Emacs was late to adopt it, and still has g…
If only VSCode had sane buffer control, and the idea of buffers. I use VSCode with Emacs key bindings for certain development. The lack of uniformity inconveniences me a lot. But indeed, VSCode is the closest thing to Emacs in its spirit.
JavaScript: "Lisp in C's clothing"
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#64I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…
> Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time. Speaking from the experience of someone who has repeatedly bounced off Emacs for going on two decades now, you absolutely will. :) > When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-…
Top of my head, I am pretty sure that I can do that with a "keyboard macro" involving list-matching-lines, and delete-matching-lines (that is literally what the commands are called). "Keyboard macro" by the way is a good and a bad name at once: It does not fully describe the vastly more powerful feature, as it is much more semantic than just repetition of keystrokes, but at its surface it looks like that and helps you get started.
If anyone reading this hasn't used keyboard macros in emacs, try it out the next time you do something repetitive. It's amazing how it can simplify those tasks. "C-x (" to start defining one, "C-x )" to end it, "C-x e" to run it, which conveniently also ends definition if you want to use it right away. Of course you can do things like "M-5 C-x e" to run it 5 times.
But I do get your point: Things are probably much less discoverable in emacs, unless you are relatively proficient in it already maybe. You need to switching into a "programmer" mind fairly quickly, while BBedit probably just lets you do powerful stuff through simple UI.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine a carpenter saying, "I don't want to master my tools, I just want to build things."
How common is it for carpenters to make their own tools? I actually don't know!
For a lot of custom carpentry, it's pretty common for carpenters to make their own jigs to solve specific problems (e.g., if you need to use your router a bit like a thickness plane to mill down some object by a couple of millimetres along some axis so it fits somewhere, you probably want to build a jig first).
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#66Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…
> use it like an editor instead of an OS
But, but... I have heard people say that "emacs is a fine operating system in need of a good editor..."
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#67Every so often I would start my Emacs config over from scratch. I might port over some old defuns from the previous, eventually, but I would always endeavour to try the latest tools and best language configurations. Consistently I found myself using Emacs and sticking to it because it offered the best developer experience. And then came Microsoft's Language Server Protocol. Emacs was late to adopt it, and still has g…
> Its largest competitor, VSCode, Just Works most of the time! You load a file, it detects your intent, and it will install the necessary extensions _along with any additional system packages necessary_. Compare this to Emacs, where it's usually quite unclear what packages to use and what tools they need to operate. Eglot? lsp-mode? Which language major mode, and which language server? How do I get them to work with company mode and so forth?
If you actually think that what VSCode can do here is remotely equivalent to what Emacs can do after customization, then I suspect you don't really understand Emacs.
Yes, VSCode does an excellent job getting you to 80%-90% of where you want to be. But because of the lack of a deep extension language (or to be fair to Emacs, an extensible implementation language), VSCode will make it very hard to get to precisely where you want to be.
Maybe that's OK for a lot of people. But those of us who have used Emacs for quite some time are quite attached to that "final 10-20%", and you can keep your language servers and "detecting my intent" and just leave us be with the way we do things.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why redo something if it works? People are still using Fortran because it works well for certain applications. Just because its old doesn't mean its outdated. I could even argue that since Emacs hasn't been phased out (and still has a decent user base) that it does something that other text editors don't (or can't) do.
Part of my point was that it's difficult to get into (still worth it overall), but another part is definitely that technology has moved on, and emacs often reminds me of its age there. No matter what, emacs still feels "alien" in my OS's desktop interface with its UI concept, and never fully integrates. That's fine if you don't want it to integrate, but I actually like some concepts of my OS's UI a lot, and miss them…
I should have clarified...
>Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world.
I was really responding to this. You're right though: there are aspects of Emacs that are dated, the UI isn't very spiffy, and I've never dealt with elisp before so I'll take your--and everyone else's--word for that. I was just suggesting that it gets the job done for a lot of people and maybe, as a result, shouldn't be classified as outdated.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#69This is why I don't bother with emacs, I just don't have the time to sink in the first place. Now that I have a young family and hobbies outside of work, I don't have the time to spend hours fixing and tinkering a setup or learning an already opinionated set up like spacemacs etc. I just use an IDE which is already set up with good defaults and I have a well settled vim config for driving remote machines or changing…
Emacs gives you back what you put into it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using it at a very basic level, and getting to that point takes minimal time. There's a 15 minute interactive tutorial linked from the start screen at which point you're fully able to get work done. You can then reach for other goodies like Org, Magit, various interactive shells, tetris, whenever you want/need. I probably used Emacs for…
I say this as a 10+-year emacs user:
The "15 minute tutorial" is emblematic of everything wrong with emacs and its community.
Just make CUA-compliant keybinds the default, and you'd draw in so many more users.
The ideal tool is one that you can start using right away, and incrementally dig into as you descend into madness/poweruserdom. The idea of having to waste 15 minutes before you can even start working in emacs is awful.
I used emacs for quite a few years only knowing how to save/open files and undo, because I refused to go through a tutorial that looks like it's stuck in 1970. I'm sure many others just give up and use vscode.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#70Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…
Why would switching machines prove to be a hindrance to customisation? The configuration files are still nothing but source code text, which could be version controlled and deployed anywhere with little automation, it's really no different from deploying software that you are writing. Customising everything 100% to my liking is not only possible, but also takes very minimal effort. Detect if it's home desktop, or wor…
first time i used tramp it felt like magic, i thought in this age where connecting multiple nodes, vpns, virtual-systems so common that everyone in interent-business would use tramp. but all i could see was people wrestling with ssh, scp, tmux/screen, lots of terminals...