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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#81

Post by BeetleB »

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…

The tell in your message (and those in general from vim users), is insisting on treating Emacs as an editor, and comparing it primarily on that benchmark.

There are no shortage of Emacs lovers and users who will accept that vim is a better editor. You didn't need to try Emacs to gain that appreciation.

The other tell (common on HN, which has a clear selection bias), is comparing Emacs to an IDE like VS Code. Many, if not the majority, of Emacs users are not primarily using Emacs for coding.

> Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy.

Neither follows the Unix philosophy well. And as many people have pointed out, most of the Unix utilities are poor at following it well.[1] The amusing thing about the Unix philosophy is that when you stay within Emacs, the Emacs environment is a much better exemplar of the Unix philosophy than Unix and its tools are. It is a lot easier to compose functionalities in different Emacs packages than it is in UNIX.

I was using a Mastodon client for Emacs and wanted to render LaTeX formulae into rendered equations. I'm an average elisp coder and I got this working in under an hour by composing different Emacs packages.

There are various ChatGPT clients out there. I wanted to integrate it with my Emacs email client (notmuch). It's not a lot of work. I doubt one could integrate things into mutt as quickly/easily.

When reading an email in Mutt, how easy is it to quickly do a Web/network query on a selected text, perform analysis on the result, and display the outcome within Mutt? The analogue is fairly easy in Emacs, despite the mail tool(s) there not having any functionality to do this.

As for Mutt in general: I used it for about a decade. While it has a soft spot in my heart, there is a reason I switched to an Emacs client - before I knew anything about customizing Emacs with elisp. There were lots of gaps in Mutt that other clients out there filled. I miss nothing from Mutt, other than the color scheme.

In many of these cases, there are simply no quick, viable solutions outside of Emacs. People spend a lot of time doing these things in Emacs because it enables them to do more than they could otherwise. Imagine someone who doesn't know any programming complaining about someone else who does. To them they just see a person "wasting" all their time on another "tool".

[1] An example: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/25/unix-doesnt-follow...

I've had the same visceral reaction when dealing with grep and find. Overly complex and bloated (albeit extremely useful).

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#82

Post by spudlyo »

markrages wrote: post #43
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?

For me, Emacs as a Lisp programming environment is just a lot fun! I was a big fan of the iPython REPL, but always struggled with reliably reloading modules when I made changes to functions and classes. With Emacs Lisp, I don't worry about any of that. Everything is so interactive and hands-on! It's easy to change and introspect the state of the system while it's running. The built-in debugger is pretty great too. It's a really nice way to work.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#83

Post by erksa »

softirq wrote: post #57
erksa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Vim has terminal support, gdb support built in. We have vim plugins maintained by the top Vim plugin specialist for git and project management. We have vimwiki, markdown, org mode support. We have fuzzy finding, autocomplete, lap support. I really don't think you can reasonably tell me you can't live in Vim, when I have had the same session open editing the linux source tree for like two months now.

Not disputing that VIM has those things, but I am telling you that I can't live in Vim based on your plugin setup. But of course, I'm glad there are good crafted ext/plugin communities on both sides so we can all can tweak it the way we like!

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#84

Post by pxc »

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 emacs cursor movement commands, which are (for some reason) the default cursor movement commands in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

I think this is because they're used in GNU readline. They're also defaults in all the macOS GUIs, though, so maybe not.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#85

Post by BeetleB »

Pr0ject217 wrote: post #11

I switched from VSCode to Doom Emacs a couple of months ago. I've been using ChatGPT (GPT-4) to help me write config (~1,000 lines of elisp code so far) and it's been very interesting/fun. I'm not going back.

That's interesting. I've asked Bing Chat and ChatGPT several times to write me elisp code, and not once did it work well. It often invents APIs.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#86

Post by BeetleB »

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.

> I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.

The problem is in the terminology: Config

Replace the word with programming and it will all make sense. People who write Javascript code to build custom tools for their own use are doing the exact same thing as Emacs users tweaking their config.

These days when I have time I'm writing elisp to make it easier for me to write math notes. One org roam node per concept/definition/proof. However, I'm building a graph: If a definition of a math object involves prior knowledge, I want to link to those nodes. The default org roam interface makes this a pain, so I want an interface that prompts me for the title, and lets me select dependencies one by one. It then inserts the node, with links to all those dependencies.

Where does all this code go?

In my config.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#87

Post by BeetleB »

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.

Use a vanilla config (i.e. no config), and it's pretty fast.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#88

Post by jb1991 »

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 in most command line environments like the Postgres CLI.

and also macOS!

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#89

Post by abhayhegde »

Actually, what's the fuss about Emacs being so good? I'm a hardcore vim user to the point that I've installed Vimium for browsers, use vim on my iPad as well.

Someone please enlighten me with links, guides or just a comment as to what's in Emacs that makes it productive and special.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#90

Post by commandlinefan »

juped wrote: post #75
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…

Emacs is an operating system, not an editor; I'm really not sure why Stallman constantly promoted the "emacs vs. vi" meme. You might as well try to switch from Notepad to Linux. It's just a type error, and you'll have a bad time.

> Emacs is an operating system

Reminds me of an old joke: "Emacs would be a great OS, if only it came with a decent text editor..."

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