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Mastering Emacs

masteringemacs.org

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Re: Mastering Emacs

#21

Post by nine_k »

psunavy03 wrote: post #4

I don't see why people are still using 1970s-era IDEs in 2023. Sure, it's a joke that emacs and vim users are at loggerheads, but name me one user of either who isn't a graybeard at this point. And specifically a graybeard who refuses to use more modern tools.

Because it works, and works well.

Because it's thought out and polished by decades of use.

Because it's extensible.

Your very question, "why are people using an IDE from 1970s in 2023" should provoke some thought. Assuming that these people are not crazy (a lot of them is rather smart and rational), what us so good about Emacs (or Vim) to make it still a preferred choice?

Re: Mastering Emacs

#22

Post by goku12 »

raincole wrote: post #16
weikju wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long after you've migrated from your current favorite IDE twice over, we'll still be using emacs. Long after whatever company sponsoring development of your current favorite IDE enshitifies them twice over, we'll still be using emacs. Long after you relearn your IDE workflows twice over, we'll still be using emacs. And emacs keeps evolving and can handle modern development just fine (except for the most garden-walled…

I started using JetBrains IDEA 12 years ago and I'm still using it today. My confidence of it being available 12 years later is high. Yes, if you're talking about a timeframe of ~50 years, use vim and emacs. I just don't care that level of future proof.

> Yes, if you're talking about a timeframe of ~50 years, use vim and emacs.

There isn't any compromises that make vim or emacs less useful than those tools with much less longevity. They are just as good as an editor to even those who don't care if they will be around 50 years from now.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#23

Post by _trackno5 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #4

I don't see why people are still using 1970s-era IDEs in 2023. Sure, it's a joke that emacs and vim users are at loggerheads, but name me one user of either who isn't a graybeard at this point. And specifically a graybeard who refuses to use more modern tools.

I mean, I'm in my late 20s and use emacs.

Maybe for whatever work you do your IDE works better for you.

In my case, I mostly code in C++. I've tried JetBrains' IDEs and it drives me insane how slow they are to index and I often get freezes when working on really large codebases.

The same applies to Visual Studio (not vscode).

vscode drives me insane with the amount of dumb notifications it keeps popping up. But I can concede that for most people it works well enough. It also doesn't perform nearly as well as Sublime Text. Working on really large codebases is a PITA with vscode.

If I need autocomplete (which I actually don't like that much), LSP works well for my needs.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#24

Post by botanical »

psunavy03 wrote: post #4

I don't see why people are still using 1970s-era IDEs in 2023. Sure, it's a joke that emacs and vim users are at loggerheads, but name me one user of either who isn't a graybeard at this point. And specifically a graybeard who refuses to use more modern tools.

I'm not an old greybeard (in my 20s) and I solely use Emacs. What's "modern tools"? Emacs has everything; with the Language Server Protocol it is exactly like VS Code and the like, with autocomplete, find definitions, native tree-sitter support. It can even read PDFs, images, man/info pages, browse the web. I don't see any advantage that VS Code has over Emacs.

PS. Try Doom Emacs and evil-mode:

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/

Re: Mastering Emacs

#25

Post by llm_thr »

ak_111 wrote: post #19
lbj wrote: post #15

It's crazy that here in 2023, Emacs is still the absolute beast when it comes to developer productivity. I had a colleague review one of my workflows the other week and after a minute or so he said "Whoa, I would have been in 5 different tools by now". If you're not into Emacs, I suggest you give it a whirl. For most development, nothing else will get you close to the joy and productivity that a well configured Emacs…

can you give an example of such workflow?

Magit is probably the easiest one for casual devs to appreciate.

"M-x magit" get a nice list of the status of the files in the current branch.

After you mark which ones you want to keep by moving up and down pressing s(tage) u(nstage) you just press "c c" and write your commit message. Then you press P and your git repo is up to date.

At a previous job the head engineer flagged the number of commits I was making as an issue since I must be wasting a lot of time pushing incremental changes. When I showed him that it took me about as long to push changes to my branch as it did to save the file he was flabbergasted that one could use git without pain.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#26

Post by aacid »

fayalalebrun wrote: post #14
psunavy03 wrote: post #4

I don't see why people are still using 1970s-era IDEs in 2023. Sure, it's a joke that emacs and vim users are at loggerheads, but name me one user of either who isn't a graybeard at this point. And specifically a graybeard who refuses to use more modern tools.

I am in my early 20s and started using Emacs when I was 18. The reason I use Emacs instead of a more "modern" tool is because nothing else comes close in terms of ease of extensibility. I would be interested to hear if you know of any modern editors where extending my editor is as easy as writing one line and running "eval-buffer".

What should I imagine under term "extending"? Is that adding new extensions (like in vscode)? I never felt that this is something I often enough to need quickest possible way to do it.

Or do you mean more like changing how editor looks, how many windows/panes/tabs are displayed and where are they displayed?

Re: Mastering Emacs

#27

Post by microtonal »

lbj wrote: post #15

It's crazy that here in 2023, Emacs is still the absolute beast when it comes to developer productivity. I had a colleague review one of my workflows the other week and after a minute or so he said "Whoa, I would have been in 5 different tools by now". If you're not into Emacs, I suggest you give it a whirl. For most development, nothing else will get you close to the joy and productivity that a well configured Emacs…

And with opinionated configurations, you can be up and running with a good configuration in minutes:

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

Re: Mastering Emacs

#28

Post by chungy »

lbj wrote: post #15

It's crazy that here in 2023, Emacs is still the absolute beast when it comes to developer productivity. I had a colleague review one of my workflows the other week and after a minute or so he said "Whoa, I would have been in 5 different tools by now". If you're not into Emacs, I suggest you give it a whirl. For most development, nothing else will get you close to the joy and productivity that a well configured Emacs…

Amen, brother.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#29

Post by goku12 »

j7ake wrote: post #7
psunavy03 wrote: post #4

I don't see why people are still using 1970s-era IDEs in 2023. Sure, it's a joke that emacs and vim users are at loggerheads, but name me one user of either who isn't a graybeard at this point. And specifically a graybeard who refuses to use more modern tools.

Systems admin people who deal with computing clusters often use vim.

The availability of vim in some systems is not reliable. Often only either vi or nano is available. Containers may not have even that (not that it's a good practice to edit files inside containers. It's just for experiments). Emacs meanwhile, has tramp. It lets you edit files remotely and transparently - even inside Kubernetes pods. And you still get to use all your Emacs customization.

Re: Mastering Emacs

#30

Post by submeta »

I highly recommend Mickey Petterson's book on Emacs. Despite using Emacs for over a decade, I discovered invaluable insights from his guide.

Currently, I rely on VS Code for coding, but turn to Emacs for text editing, macros, and text transformation with Elisp.

For a fast track to mastering Emacs, Mickey's book is a must-read.

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