The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by YetAnotherNick » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:07 AM UTC

forty wrote: post #80

kazoomonger wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually just started using emacs recently, specifically doom emacs. It works smoothly out of the box and is super easy to enable LSP for. I'm not going to try to convince anybody to switch, but if you ever try emacs again, would definitely recommend trying out doom emacs.

Same. I actually switched from VSCode, and I like it much better :)

I switched from Emacs to VSCode to doom emacs and will not be going back anytime soon. For people who mainly want to focus on development, I would say it is fine to break the conventional vim/emacs wisdom that you should start from scratch.

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

#192

Post by varjag » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #81

Jtsummers wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with that convinced me that many academic Fortran users are cargo cult programmers to the extreme. They're "taught" by examining the code written by their advisor's advisor's advisor who may have properly learned F77 back in 1980, but no one else did. Even then, FORTRAN 77 is a major change over FORTRAN (1957 and even the later FORTRAN 66). Specifically, that's the version that got structured programmin…

> Even then, FORTRAN 77 is a major change over FORTRAN (1957 and even the later FORTRAN 66). That's because FORTRAN is one of the oldest languages, and you'd expect lots of changes as the whole field develops. If you use that as a metric, most languages will appear stagnant. Python hasn't changed much in the last 20 years, for example.

Yep, folks often fail to distinguish between old and OLD.

One might think Eclipse IDE is old. But Fortran predates the three-point seatbelts. The Vietnam War. Berlin Crisis. The Space Race.

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

#193

Post by frosted-flakes » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:11 AM UTC

alex_smart wrote: post #176

SquibblesRedux wrote: post #155

I used to use Emacs for large files and vi for small, quick edits. I am now using VS Code for large files and still vi for quick edits. The single feature that got me to switch from Emacs to VS Code was the ability to use a mouse for navigation and selection. (My Emacs and vi usage was always in a terminal.) I had tried XEmacs for a while, but found it too aesthetically displeasing. I would be happy to return to Emac…

> I had tried XEmacs for a while, but found it too aesthetically displeasing. Why would you even bother with a fork whose last release was 12 years ago? :\

Maybe that's when they tried it. Does it matter?

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

#194

Post by alpaca128 » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:18 AM UTC

richardjdare wrote: post #183

I like Emacs because it's a live programming environment focused on the editing of text. As far as I know, there is no other editor with this capability. Sure, they all let you write "plug-ins" but none of them let you do your work by writing code interactively, alongside normal editing commands and GUI operations. As a programmer, this is how I want to do everything with my computer. I don't have many customizations…

> As far as I know, there is no other editor with this capability.

Well, to some degree Vim can do this too. It doesn't let you "eval" a function you just typed into a buffer, but it can eval a vimscript file that you just edited. Including the vimrc, but just like Emacs' init.el reloading it doesn't actually reset the state. But where Vim can't just eval a whole function you can write very complex keybindings on the fly in a much simpler syntax, which made up for it in a few situations for me.

And it's very similar in how the configuration and plugins work - it's all just a scripting language spread across files, and instead of having separately developed plugins you just write a function and run it, more or less.

Emacs is more flexible still, but with its own quirks.

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

#195

Post by impendia » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

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…

What is your criticism of LaTeX?

I am a research mathematician, and I and essentially all my colleagues are LaTeX users. To me it feels like the correct tool for the job; the only widespread criticism I've heard is that it doesn't produce documents accessible to the blind. (And I've heard that work on this is in process.)

I tend to be unsympathetic to criticism that a tool is "outdated"; if a tool is right for the job, why change it? But I want to keep an open mind -- what would you like to see in LaTeX's place?

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

#196

Post by akho » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #124

eulgro wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ sudo apt install texlive latexmk $ latexmk -pdf main.tex I didn't try it, but it wasn't much harder than that if I recall... If you're on Windows, well, it's your loss :(

Excuse me for being one of the 80% of working Americans

Highly relevant username.

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

#197

Post by hnarn » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:46 AM UTC

This is of course anecdotal but one of the reasons I never got into emacs is because every person I’ve met who was really into it was a pathological tinkerer. I’ve worked with people who got no work done in half a day because they were remaking their config for the third time, or reinstalling their Linux distribution.

I’m not trying to insinuate that all emacs users are like this but it brings me to the point of why I don’t want to learn it: sometimes the ugly way is still the fastest way, and if it works it ain’t stupid. For me, the more time something takes to get into, the higher the payoff has to be to make it worth it. For this reason, emacs has never seemed interesting to me, because it seems like the only people “saving time” in it are those that spent a decade learning it first.

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

#198

Post by Kinrany » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 10:47 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #58

samatman wrote: post #22

I don't know whether or not it's a perfect translation, but from his description I would offer "tunnel vision" for Scheuklappen-Effekt. Emacs is a truly remarkable program, which has painted itself into a corner. There are just too many locked-in architectural decisions to make a complete list, and it's good enough at being what it is to suck up all the oxygen needed to build another text editor which could overcome…

>if you want to really use it [org-mode] anywhere but inside emacs, good luck to you I wonder if org could be ported to provide a language server via lsp, and in so doing become cross-platform? Org really is a superior markup format.

Can it be used without elisp?

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

#199

Post by jmchuster » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 11:00 AM UTC

ellyagg wrote: post #144

stouset wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comm…

I'm a long term emacs user and I know that my emacs use is not down simply to lock-in. I know this because a year ago I spent a month using Panic Nova to see what I might be missing with emacs. Nova looked super pretty and it's easy to figure out how to do a lot of things out-of-the-box that's harder to figure out on emacs at first. But there are a couple of core things about emacs that I just don't see replicated in…

> buffers and windows

How is this different from tabs? You have global search to open files in new tabs, you can opt to leave a trail of new tabs as you follow links through your code, you create arbitrary new tabs and plop snippets in, and have an option to persist to a file whenever you wish. You can reorganize your tabs layout, create an arbitrary number of rows and columns, move tabs back and forth between different groups, splitting and merging groups as you need.

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

#200

Post by yung_steezy » Sat, Aug 07, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

I only started using emacs relatively recently, maybe since 2016 or so, but I use it every day. I've worked in a couple of different places in that time, first using Debian and now I've got a company macbook. By using emacs I didn't need to change my workflow at all between the two operating systems. What's more, even though I dislike macOS, I am able to enjoy using my work PC without grumbling about the OS like some of my colleagues do.

As other comments have pointed out, there are some limitations to the amount of productivity that you can squeeze out of emacs vs. modern dedicated software. I can appreciate this point as a senior developer often scrambling to work to deadlines. That said, those potential gains in productivity need to be weighed against the potential loss in passion for my job that might occur if I dropped emacs.