916 Days of Emacs • Hacker News Board

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#41

Post by softirq » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #27

softirq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Huh, my experience is the other way around. The "killer" of vim is the control scheme, and evil mode ports that over very faithfully to emacs. Then you get the best of both worlds. Why would you use vim other than in very barebones environments where you cannot access your own config? (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

Why would I want to run an emacs layer adding more latency to my work to turn Emacs in to Vim when, as I said, I can do everything in Emacs I can do in Vim.

> (I also don't see how tramp is an issue -- it opens up workflows I wouldn't even have access to without it!)

Because it will randomly freeze and it's single threaded, it's slow, and it's also not novel. Vim can also edit files over SSH, VSCode can run itself remotely.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#42

Post by hospitalJail » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #20

I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.

This is basically why I don't use intellij.

Work pays for everything, I just dont want to wait 10 minutes for an environment to change.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#43

Post by markrages » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

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.

In my last 20 years of using emacs, I have spent about 45 minutes total fiddling with the config. (Before that I spent a little more time getting it set up.) Am I missing out on something?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#44

Post by Laaas » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

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.

That's 28k dollars to configure Emacs, if we assume 100 USD / hour...

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#45

Post by crabbone » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

adamc wrote: post #36

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.

[flagged]

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#46

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #31

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. I…

> what the weight of emacs was on you

What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just using an IDE.

But that's just me.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#47

Post by sampo » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

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.

> 282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day

It's 0.43 hours a day, which is 26 minutes, not 45. (Hint: 0.5 hours is 30 minutes.)

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#48

Post by todd8 » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

In grad school in the 80’s I used Emacs. At home around 1984 I got my first PC running MSDOS. For years I used a commercial product that used Emacs keybindings (Epsilon) because Emacs wouldn’t run on my PC.

When I went to work at IBM I was disappointed that concerns over the Gnu license forced me to use vi for a few years, but I discovered it to be great an editor for me.

I eventually was drawn back to Emacs and now, many years later, I enjoy playing with my config file every week. There is always something new to be added.

It’s org mode and magit that make it impossible to leave Emacs. (Right now I’m experimenting with a configuration where I’ve installed the top 600 most popular add on packages at once. I’m kind of using the wisdom of crowds approach to picking packages this time. Next week it will be something else.)

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#49

Post by light_hue_1 » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:06 PM UTC

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.

There's a very good reason for it. I spend about an hour every month. It sharpens your tool and pays back massively over time.

When we need to quickly debug or carry out a complex operation at work? People gather around my machine. Once you're set up with things like org-mode, magit, lsp your productivity goes up a lot.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#50

Post by 1066 » Thu, Apr 13, 2023, 5:06 PM UTC

dwringer wrote: post #37

throwawaysalome wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, it's an extension of your life right. Some people find it fulfilling to kit out there house with exactly what they think they desire. Its just a matter of processing the stuff that makes you happy while providing _internal_ development.