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916 Days of Emacs

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Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#171

Post by gshulegaard »

slashdev wrote: post #158

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij? I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know. I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools? Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary. Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. M…

I think I would rephrase this question as why would I stop using emacs for VS code and intellij? Seriously, there is no feature they have that my emacs config doesn't (AFAICT after using Intellij and VS code each for 4+ years). But I have the ability to work with emacs without ever touching my mouse. You may consider that only being "slightly" faster, but every time I use VS code, _feel_ slow because I know how fast I would have been in emacs.

Combine this with my tiling window manager and I pretty much only have to use my mouse to interact with web browsers. That's the killer feature that makes VS Code and Intellij _feel_ inferior to me.

Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that VSCode and Intellij are _actually_ inferior to Emacs. I think both are great in their own right, but after years of familiarity I have a fluency with Emacs (because of the keyboard oriented interface) that I could never have with them.

To be fair, for someone without emacs fluency I would probably steer them towards VSCode and Intellij as they are definitely more approachable. In fact, I have done exactly that for several of my friends and colleagues.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#172

Post by commandlinefan »

pmoriarty wrote: post #108
celeritascelery wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised you didn’t use evil-mode to emulate the vim keybindings. Or was this a an attempt to use “pure” Emacs without packages and customization?

It sounds like they're not even aware that it was an option. Many people don't realize that emacs' default keybindings can be changed to be modal in exactly the same as vim, by using evil.

> they're not even aware that it was an option

Actually in this case I was - but my goal was to use "vanilla" emacs just like I use "vanilla" vi(m). After all, if I'm using vi key bindings... why not just use vi?

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#173

Post by jvanderbot »

avgcorrection wrote: post #165
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'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. This is like saying that you have been a mountain biker all your life, but then decided to play the trumpet for one year. Nonsensical conjunction.

Nonsense. Emacs and vi have similar use cases, right? And similar inputs (keyboard) and similar environments, for similar users.

They might be a difference of degree along a few axes, but they aren't a difference of kind like trumpets and mountain bikes are.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#174

Post by smabie »

avgcorrection wrote: post #165
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'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. This is like saying that you have been a mountain biker all your life, but then decided to play the trumpet for one year. Nonsensical conjunction.

As someone who used Emacs 10yrs before ditching it.. I just really don't think it's very good at doing much.

I mean sure it can sorta half ass a lot of different things but besides org-mode and magit, it's a pretty mediocre and clunky piece of software (clunky, incredibly slow, ugly, etc)

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#175

Post by keybored »

LastNevadan wrote: post #98
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 judg…

> In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi.

That’s what we do when we’re younger. Judge things on the wrong basis. Or come up with weird theories on how people who prefer different things do so because they’re deficient in some way—

> Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist.

wait what…

> 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.

You see that the there are Alt and Control keys on both sides of the (American[1]) keyboard. Right? Touch typing is no harder with Control and Alt than it is with Shift.

> 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.

One Year of Experience Ten Times Over: The Comment.

[1] The keyboard (ish) that these silly programs were kind of made for. The “European” keyboard has AltGr on the right side.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#176

Post by KryDos »

slashdev wrote: post #158

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij? I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know. I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools? Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary. Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. M…

I don't think the fact that Vim and Emacs were created a long time ago makes them inferior.

They keep developing and they are up to date with many/all programming-features. There are bunch of extensions that VScode just doesn't have despite it's huge extension store.

Also the main thing for me about these editors and especially Emacs is that you can program it. Not just configure it but actually program and do anything with it. You can hook into any piece of the code and change it. You can read the source code of any "extension" and patch it on the fly. I don't think I'm aware of any other editors that allow that.

It's huge power.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#177

Post by peterashford »

hospitalJail wrote: post #42
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.

I use Goland at work - which is intellij. Switching between project environments is about 2 seconds. Cold start is about 5 seconds.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#178

Post by commandlinefan »

pxc wrote: post #84
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.

> GNU readline

Interesting... I always assumed that emacs was around for a while before anybody generalized a "readline" library, but I guess it makes sense that readline would have come first.

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#179

Post by lezojeda »

anikom15 wrote: post #170
slashdev wrote: post #158

Why do people still use emacs and vim in this age of VS code and intellij? I’ve heard plenty of arguments, but they kind of suck to be honest. They’re more like rationalizations for why they stick to what they know. I just don’t get it. Why use inferior tools? Both are lighter weight. Big deal, buy a faster computer. It’s nothing compared to your salary. Both may let you type slightly faster and move around faster. M…

Why waste time learning about some fad IDE that will get replaced by something ‘better’ in five years? Newer text editors don’t do anything better than Vim, and they are strictly worse when it comes to their primary function: editing text. ‘You can install a vi emulator.’ - Waste of time. I already have vim. My vimrc file still works. New machine? Just install vim and copy my vimrc over. Emacs is a totally different…

[dead]

Re: 916 Days of Emacs

#180

Post by ragnese »

kqr wrote: post #63
softirq wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Org mode - I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode and find it to be oversold and another time waster for people who are already wasting time configuring their editors. I personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin for org mode. 2. Magit - Tim Pope is the pope of Vim plugins and fugitive is easily as good or better than Magit. I have never had any issue doing any sort of complex task in git or fixing conflic…

> if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything On the contrary, Emacs tries to do just one thing: provide an Elisp runtime for other applications. It does this fairly well. Do not confuse Elisp applications like evil, org, calc, magit, etc. with Emacs itself!

Yep. If you see Emacs as a text editor with lots of features, then it's doing lots of things. But, if you see Emacs as a platform that comes bundled with some apps by default, then its "one thing" is to be a text-oriented app platform.

The whole "do one thing" slogan is kind of vacuous anyway; e.g., what if my "one thing" is "implement all WWW standards to be able to use any web page"? Is that still "one thing"? If not, then wouldn't implementing only "one" part of WWW be useless?

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