Emacs Bedrock: A minimal Emacs starter kit

My personal experience is that most of the new dev tooling is Linux/MacOS only, and maaaaybe sometimes it's ported badly to Windows.

Are people using Emacs with LSPs for Java, Python, for example? Are they solid? Would you be able to use them day to day for software engineering work?

People were saying that when I started using it, over 20 years ago. Apparently I was supposed to be using Notepad++ or some MS program du jour which no one remembers now. I wouldn't be surprised if I keep using it for the rest of my career.

> it can take weeks of configuring

More like decades ;)

> to get it anywhere near as productive as something like VS Code or Jetbrains IDE

Nope - it's significantly more productive. At least for me - I can't speak for you, but I do seem to be much faster at processing text than any of my colleagues who are using those other editors.

All the configuring is by design. You can set up the editor to take advantage of your strengths and paper over your weaknesses.

There is Google, you know.

https://ergoemacs.github.io/

It's the biggest thing to happen to Emacs in 30 years. That is presumably why all the beardies ignore it.

I used to know 20-30 totally different editors. That all went away circa 1990 when the CUA UI swept the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

All late-era DOS stuff, and Windows >= 3.x, Mac OS X and ~all Linux GUIs are compliant.

I refuse to learn any other editor UI. Life is too short. Comply with CUA, or die in a fire.

Clearly bearing the costs of a wrong decision - learn vim keybindings 30 years ago, and use it in every popular editor and ide, including emacs, ever since. Only half-joking.

Here's what I recall were the major pain points then:

* You need to choose between MSYS2 and "native" Windows binaries (add WSL today for more choices).

* The choice above will influence how you interact with various shells. Getting shell encoding right and filtering out escape sequences that don't render well in Emacs terminal emulator of choice was a headache.

* All interactions with filesystem are slower. If a mode depends on interaction with filesystem a lot, like Magit, you are going to have a bad time. At the time CEDET was still a thing, but on Windows it was absolutely unusable. (Very infrequently I need to look at wife's laptop which runs some more modern Windows, and that's usually because she has some problems with Git or other infra, and I installed Emacs there to make dealing with this stuff easier: Maigt is awfully slow there).

* I don't know if Tramp has any kind of support for the convoluted and bizarre Windows user permission management -- I never had enough time to figure that out. On Linux, if I need to edit files owned by root, I do C-x f /sudo::/..., but there doesn't seem to be anything like that for Windows.

* In general, you will be missing stuff that you could easily accomplish in Emacs by pressing "!" in Dired buffer -- because there's nothing / very little of useful stuff you can call on files. If you don't install emacs with other MSYS2 utilities, your search options in Dired will be bad (default Windows find), similarly bad is the find in files that normally relies on grep to work. Same situation with spellchecker which relies on an external program.

I'd still take it over something like VSCode, but I would have to invest a lot of effort into bringing it up to the possible / desired level of comfort. It's definitely not the best place to use Emacs. Luckily, today, I'm in the place where I can, for the most part, forget MS Windows exists.