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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#91

Post by 0zemp1c »

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, not an editor

what does it take for this tired and false meme to die?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#92

Post by sanitycheck »

sampo wrote: post #47
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.)

Superb point, I did always suspect I'm an idiot but it's useful to have it pointed out sometimes!

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#93

Post by 0zemp1c »

mbork_pl wrote: post #40
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…

> 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... )

I wouldn't call Magit "killer" at this point, its basically feature competitive with other editor git integrations and that is about it

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#94

Post by 0zemp1c »

BeetleB wrote: post #81
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…

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…

[flagged]

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#95

Post by 0zemp1c »

schemescape wrote: post #80
softirq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe a Vim expert can help me out. I’ve used Vim for a long time, but never with any plugins, and only a few lines in my .vimrc. My problem is that the syntax highlighting, specifically for TypeScript is pretty bad. I have a regular expression (for parsing front matter) that seems to cause Vim’s syntax highlighting to go haywire (it stops and sometimes crashes). Is anyone aware of a way to get more reliable syntax h…

using lsp with typescript-language-server?

most of the neovim setup scripts (lazyvim etc) get this set up automatically

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#96

Post by BeetleB »

0zemp1c wrote: post #94
BeetleB wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Take a look at EmacsConf talks and count how many talks are not programming related. Start delving into the speaker's backgrounds as well.

Hang out at the Emacs subreddit and you'll see a similar trend.

Follow Sacha's weekly Emacs news and you'll see a similar trend.

Some of the authors of very well known Emacs packages don't do programming for a living - in fact quite a few learned programming just so they could improve Emacs for their own needs.

Protesilaos is practically a legend these days. He went from no programming or Linux knowledge to expert level in a very short time.[1] His background is in philosophy, law and economics.

The author of helm, one of the most popular and possibly the most powerful completion package in Emacs, is a ski instructor.

Although I learned Emacs primarily to code, I myself did not use it primarily for programming for the first 5 years. I was using it for email and org mode, and did my programming via Visual Studio. The number of people who primarily use it for org mode is huge. There are plenty of people who code in anything else (vim, VSCode), but use Emacs just for magit.

[1] https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2021-04-16-emacs-moral-lesso...

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#97

Post by nequo »

Laaas wrote: post #44
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...

By that argument, watching The Irishman costs 350 USD.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#98

Post by LastNevadan »

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…

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials.

I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi.

After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judgement as an undergraduate was often incorrect. (I had also deemed Voltaire, Spanish, sociology, microeconomics and many other things as "stupid", and came to understand as an adult that they weren't.) So, I decided to give emacs another chance.

My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost always on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit.

I noticed that lots of skilled and professional engineers never learned to touch type. That discovery itself was odd to me: why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly. But they do. And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#99

Post by superdisk »

retrocryptid wrote: post #78

Oh man. I'm embarrassed to say I've been using emacs for almost 40 years and it probably accounts for 80% of my screen time. I wonder how many people know emacs predates gnu-emacs? I remember being skeptical of open source until I saw what gnu emacs could do. Then I got slightly more skeptical when I looked at the code ;-)

Tell us more. What were you using before GNU?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#100

Post by 0zemp1c »

BeetleB wrote: post #96
0zemp1c wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Take a look at EmacsConf talks and count how many talks are not programming related. Start delving into the speaker's backgrounds as well. Hang out at the Emacs subreddit and you'll see a similar trend. Follow Sacha's weekly Emacs news and you'll see a similar trend. Some of the authors of very well known Emacs packages don't do programming for a living - in fact quite a few learned programming just so they could imp…

everything you refer to is less than 0.5% of emacs use

maybe 0.2% of all emacs users even know EmacsConf exists

maybe 1% know of Sacha Chua, doubt it though, probably 0.1% have heard of her

easily over 99% of emacs use is for coding, actually that is low, if you snapshotted all emacs sessions in the world right now, more like 99.9% of them would be coding

I'm not even sure why this is being debated

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