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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#31

Post by taeric »

commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

The default cursor movement commands probably predate emacs. Such that you are used to readline defaults. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083753 is the first post I'm finding on that.

That said, I'm curious what the weight of emacs was on you? If it was that you were wanting to be in the other editor, than it makes sense that you should stay in the other editor. But this is no different than a lot of things. Is why some folks don't like changing the vehicle type that they use daily. Very little rational argument one way or the other. Such that, yes, you should use what makes you happy. Not only does it make you happy, but you are probably more effective because of that.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#32

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaysalome wrote: post #28
sanitycheck wrote: post #25

282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

Some guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys find they can get to B faster and more safely if they can modify the car.

[deleted]

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#33

Post by EnigmaCurry »

softirq wrote: post #23
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…

> some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable.

Over SSH? Did you turn on ssh connection sharing in ssh config?

> ControlMaster auto

> ControlPersist yes

> ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%u-%r@%h:%p

massive speedup when you do this, otherwise it starts a new connection for every operation.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#34

Post by erksa »

softirq wrote: post #23
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…

Use both heavily. Vim is fantastic for editing one off files.

Emacs on the other hand is fantastic to work on a computer for a long period of time. I do use evil mode, as I do think it's a much better way to work in a file. Project management, magit, org-mode, being able to edit functionality of the editor within couple of mins to adjust for an temporary change/or indefinitely is what keeps me coming back to emacs.

I've tried vim variations that build in project management and all I'm missing from emacs, but left it at some own written telescope functions to cover base needs.

Love for both, but to me they are not comparable.

(Maybe because I picked up emacs at the same time a good friend picked up vim, and it's been a parallel editor journey for 6+ years)

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#36

Post by adamc »

I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange.

I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#37

Post by dwringer »

throwawaysalome wrote: post #28
sanitycheck wrote: post #25

282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

Some guys look at a car as going from point A and B. Some guys find they can get to B faster and more safely if they can modify the car.

Furthermore I'd say that I (presumably like most emacs users) am probably closer to 45 minutes per month, or per year, on general emacs config stuff, certainly not per day. It has still made a huge difference for me in terms of convenience and just general aesthetics.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#38

Post by School-Cotton »

sanitycheck wrote: post #25

282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

The whole point of emacs is that it’s not “fiddling with config”, it’s programming. Which is an activity a lot of people enjoy.

Emacs is essentially an IDE for developing emacs.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#39

Post by circuit »

commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

I had a similar experience, but came to the opposite conclusion. I walked away replacing vim with emacs as my daily driver. Elisp is far more extensible than vimscript and evil-mode is pretty much at 1-1 feature parity with the real vim. I don't care much for the emacs movement keybindings except for the readline movement commands.

> to this day I still don't see what the hype was about.

Most of vim is written in C with some interfaces exposed for scripting. Emacs is mostly written in elisp with some C code where necessary. The latter lends itself better to 'hackability' imo

For my own machines, I build emacs and import my saved init.el

On other machines, there is usually a standard vi/vim install that I can use if I am ssh'd in somewhere where I don't have my personalized copy of emacs. If I remember, I'll try to put these five lines[1] in the .vimrc for some saner defaults

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25410390

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#40

Post by mbork_pl »

softirq wrote: post #23
commandlinefan wrote: post #15

I've been a hardcore vi user pretty much my entire life, but I decided to force myself to spend a year using emacs a while back just to see what all the fuss was about. When the year was over and I "allowed" myself to return to vi, it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders... to this day I still don't see what the hype was about. On the plus side, though, I memorized the emacs cursor movement commands, which…

I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…

> There’s really nothing killer in Emacs

1. Org mode 2. Magit 3. Wdired 4. Synergy between various components (shameless plug: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_benefits_of_everything_being...)

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