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The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

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Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#91

Post by taeric »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #56
anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'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 Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world.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-…

With modern autocomplete for commands, discovering commands in emacs has never been easier. "M-x sort" will show you all fuzzy completions of that commands basically instantly.

The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#92

Post by ashton314 »

taeric wrote: post #91
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

With modern autocomplete for commands, discovering commands in emacs has never been easier. "M-x sort" will show you all fuzzy completions of that commands basically instantly. The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.

I'll second this. Take a look at Vertico [1] and Consult [2] which really improve discoverability. Other nice packages (links found on the Vertico page) include Marginalia and Orderless.

[1]: https://github.com/minad/vertico

[2]: https://github.com/minad/consult

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#93

Post by SirensOfTitan »

I maintained my own emacs config for a while and ended up moving to Doom mainly for a more thoughtful shortcut config. I spend a couple hours every once in a while tinkering for fun (and to fix issues with my workflow).

Sure, you may be tinkering more in emacs and working less, but free play is an integral part of growing skills, as is feeling a sense of joy when using your tools. It’s okay to do things without a goal in mind.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#94

Post by tech_tuna »

lgrapenthin wrote: post #13

I am also a 10+ year GNU Emacs user. I haven't customized it beyond font size and a few settings. I even use the default theme. Other users seem to go crazy and try to make it into a spaceship. Then they claim that it takes a lot of time to customize it. It mainly is very different to operate from all programs and window managers that we are used to these days, and people perceive this as a wrong and try to "fix" it…

Same here, I'm mostly sticking with it because of muscle memory at this point, definitely not because of RMS.

I may switch over to a new school UI based editor one of these days. I used VSCode for a bit but got sick of it.

Like OP, I really wouldn't recommend emacs to anyone just learning.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#95

Post by stouset »

anyfoo wrote: post #2

I'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…

> And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things.

FWIW this is something most editors let you do trivially.

With VS Code, select the lines you want to sort, press Cmd-Shift-P to bring up fuzzy command search, type "sort", press enter. Your selected lines are sorted.

I think you might be surprised to find that all the major editors these days have most all of the little things you might want day-to-day covered. Of course the set of little things one cares about will differ from person to person and from the capabilities we've personally found the most use out of. It's hard to argue when that one thing you use every day isn't supported in some other editor, but the list of those is shrinking quicker than I suspect most people realize.

There are a lot of people contributing to these tools and that plus not having to reinvent every wheel from scratch (and maintain that code on top) means that modern editors can cut into the lead time advantage of something like Emacs quicker than you might otherwise think.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#96

Post by saulrh »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #67
dleslie wrote: post #40

Every 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…

It's not even that - My problem is that I depend on emacs for the first 50% of my workflow, not the last 50%. For example, I use key chords for every common operation - ;h ;j k; l; move between panes, xz invokes M-x, kj brings up the buffer list, z\ and z- split panes, etc. I barely go ten seconds without using one of occur, change-inner, a 500-element kill ring, consult-yank-pop, tramp, magit, etc. Emacs works so well for me not because it has crazy extensions, but because its extensibility goes so deep that you can bring the crazy extensions deep into the tightest loops in your interaction with the editor where you can gain the greatest benefits.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#97

Post by remexre »

eulgro wrote: post #47
CalChris wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm no…

> With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). $ latexmk -pdf main.tex How hard is that? The only thing Overleaf adds here is a button and a 10x compilation time overhead. > I don't always remember what that magic meant. Overleaf mostly won't help you here, unless I'm mistaken. I don't mean to be aggressive here, I just don't get th…

How do you do package (version) management for LaTeX? There's more than a few documents I've come across that won't build on my system, giving often-indecipherable compilation errors. Overleaf at least ensures everyone involved is using the same environment without needing to ship a Docker container or the like, or try to pin down versions.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#98

Post by neolog »

danShumway wrote: post #9

It does kind of bother me that Org doesn't have a particularly good formal spec. There are a ton of parsers out there, which is great, but there is no Emacs-independent set of tests you can run against a parser to figure out if it's compliant. Ultimately, the Org format is what Emacs says it is, and everyone else just tries to play catch-up. I feel like this is a little bit of a missed opportunity. I use Emacs becaus…

What is the advantage of plain text? Other than that Emacs is bad at editing other file types.

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#99

Post by anyonecancode »

Interesting post. I'm ~6 mo into using emacs, but I'm a long time vim user. I use emacs for org mode and org-roam, and for personal finance[0]. And sometimes, magit for git. And honestly... I may never use it for much more beyond this, and that's totally fine with me. Which I suppose is the point of flexibility -- people can use a flexible tool in the way that works best for them. My contribution here is to note that its _also_ ok to decide a tool, even an impressive tool, is something you only want in a few specific contexts without feeling bad about not adopting it everywhere.

I think its working out that way for me because I'm not actually much of a tinkerer. I very much like the straightforwardness of plain text, and I like all tools that empower me to put that in the center of my workflows. I can take or leave emacs, but I love org-*. Actually not too different from how I got into programming in the first place -- being able to write a plain text file in a certain format, point my browser to it, and boom it's a web page, was magic. And from there into actual programs -- use a certain format and boom it does stuff... The tools themselves - eh. Keep it simpler and I'm happier, but I'm not much for customizing them.

I can see how for the tinkering personality one can really get into emacs. That's not me, but emacs works for me for some things, and I've been happy to learn it for those.

[0]https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode

Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

#100

Post by neolog »

playcache wrote: post #8

This 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…

> the shells available in emacs. They feel slow

Emacs' eshell is the fastest shell out there according to one metric.

https://danluu.com/term-latency/

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