121–130 of 191 posts
Long-time (25+ years) Emacs user. The first thing I do on a new installation is turn off the GUI features (like, menus and toolbars) - no-one I know who uses Emacs uses the mouse.
edit: i'm on windows
Whoever thinks that VSCode does not have any learning curve or is somehow magically easy, needs to take a reality check, that thing is overwhelming with all its popups, hovers, sidebars etc. beyond all reason when you first run it (and later too). I'm an Emacs user and I don't in any way support the notion it's somehow easy or intuitively workable, it's most definitely not and never has been. I just think that VSCode…
I'm also a daily Emacs user. I'm no wizard; I've leaned on starter kits like Spacemacs and Doom my whole Emacs life. Likewise, I find VSCode overstimulating and, for lack of a better word, rude . I just tried setting up RustRover for a side project at work on Friday. It's my first time using an IDE since I was a Scala developer near the beginning of my professional career. I only had an hour or two to play, but I end…
Double shift, to bring up the pallet, and start typing. Though it also have a ton of shortcuts, and shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command.
Try this: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x/
Whenever you don't use keyboard shortcut for any action, this suggests you the available keyboard shortcut.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't downvote you, but you have a misconception. There's no such thing as an Emacs "look". Its appearance, UI and UX, are wildly different depending on how the user wants it to look and behave. Considering that it is a very configurable system that happens to expose building blocks for a text editor, every Emacs installation is thus different from another. We could say that the Emacs GUI toolkit and perhaps its i…
My comment is discussing the defaults. Most users will use the defaults and not customize their editor, especially if they are just using it for the first time. The defaults are important. The single threaded issue is a problem, but one that can be somewhat worked around. I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.
But those are not the users who choose Emacs in the first place. Emacs is made for customization.
Besides, there are many preconfigured distributions of it, such as the one discussed here, which can effectively be used as the defaults, if you don't like the ones shipped OOB.
> I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.
Well, I reckon you're wrong. Emacs in all of its incarnations has been in use for nearly half a century, and its adoption has never been greater. Some people will point to low percentages in developer surveys, but that is the wrong metric to focus on. Its usage will never reach mainstream numbers, which is probably for the best, but it will continue to be enjoyed by enthusiastic users for a long time to come.
I love these packages (like this, Spacemacs, Doom, etc.), even though I've used Emacs for over 30 years. I don't use them directly, but they give me ideas and alert me to packages I haven't heard of (eat?). And that gives me an excuse to go on another round of config-tweaking, which any Emacs user loves.
Emacs for programming is definitely one important use case. This tool seems to focus on that use case, though I think I can get 75% of it by just using Emacs keybindings with regular VSCode. But Emacs is so much more than an ‘IDE’. I realize some don’t like the Emacs approach of ‘here’s a box of parts and tools, build it the way you want’, but that’s the point of Emacs. Besides the functional approach, of course, the…
Nitpick, but emacs and emacs lisp don't seem remotely "functional" to me insofar as expressing computation in terms of pure functions and immutable datatypes. The core datastructures that an elisp program interacts with (buffers, variables) are all mutable and functions (setq, buffer-string, etc) are decidedly impure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
VSCode rely on familiar pattern and UX to let you get started easily. But out of the box, it's pretty much notepad level. Vim and Emacs start from the premises that you need powerful tools. And they give them to you alongside the possibility to integrate external tools easily with the editor workflow. With VSCode any integration needs to be a full project. With emacs and vims, it's a few lines of config.
You absolutely don't need extensions for JS development. It is absolutely NOT notepad level. In my experience with beginners, installing an extension is also incredibly easy compared to getting them to edit some vim/emacs config.
Yet, extending just about any functionality of Emacs for an experienced user is far simpler than in anything else - you can write some expressions in a scratch buffer and change the behavior of any command - built-in or third-party. Not only wouldn't you even have to restart anything - you wouldn't even need to save that code on the file system.
There's a strong correlation between perceived difficulty at the beginning and notable simplicity at later stages. Things that are seemingly harder to grok often open up avenues for clarity later. Conversely, things that seem easy to get into, later often become full of bottlenecks and complexity.
Imagine attempting to replace all the knobs, controls, buttons and switches in an Airbus A380 cockpit with a single touch-based display à la Tesla and claim it's now easier to train new pilots, but you've just made them dependent on a system they don't deeply understand, you've traded 6 months of training for a lifetime of brittle expertise.
I am forever indebted to my younger self for investing some time in understanding the grand ideas behind Vim and Emacs, and never, even once, have I regretted my choices. Rather the opposite - I regret wasting a big chunk of my life chasing popular trends aimed at "intuitive use", "easy start" and "it just works™". I would have never developed the true "hacker's mindset" without them.
Undeniably, there's an immense pedagogical value in tools that make it easy for beginners, but there's also a mental trap there. It's ingrained into human nature - the brain simply doesn't like the grit; it naturally gravitates toward comfort and minimal effort - it just wants to remain lazy. Yet there's a compounding effect of initial investment that pays off later. Sadly, we keep trying to find ways to dumb things down.
Emacs for programming is definitely one important use case. This tool seems to focus on that use case, though I think I can get 75% of it by just using Emacs keybindings with regular VSCode. But Emacs is so much more than an ‘IDE’. I realize some don’t like the Emacs approach of ‘here’s a box of parts and tools, build it the way you want’, but that’s the point of Emacs. Besides the functional approach, of course, the…
> Besides the functional approach Nitpick, but emacs and emacs lisp don't seem remotely "functional" to me insofar as expressing computation in terms of pure functions and immutable datatypes. The core datastructures that an elisp program interacts with (buffers, variables) are all mutable and functions (setq, buffer-string, etc) are decidedly impure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm also a daily Emacs user. I'm no wizard; I've leaned on starter kits like Spacemacs and Doom my whole Emacs life. Likewise, I find VSCode overstimulating and, for lack of a better word, rude . I just tried setting up RustRover for a side project at work on Friday. It's my first time using an IDE since I was a Scala developer near the beginning of my professional career. I only had an hour or two to play, but I end…
IntelliJ shines when you use the command pallet, keyboard shortcuts, and IdeaVIM Double shift, to bring up the pallet, and start typing. Though it also have a ton of shortcuts, and shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command. Try this: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9792-key-promoter-x/ Whenever you don't use keyboard shortcut for any action, this suggests you the available keyboard shortcut.
I just want to share my anecdotal, personal story. I used IntelliJ professionally for almost a decade. I learned some advanced and undocumented features. I've collaborated with Jetbrains team members to help improving the features. It felt like I work for them. I still occasionally receive YouTrack notification emails for the bugs I posted circa 2009, that are still not fixed today, btw.
IntelliJ is to blame for why my transition to Emacs took me two years - I carried the fear of investing too much into a new thing. I feared of liking it, and someday not finding some features I was so attached to in IntelliJ. I was scared that I will be intellectually and emotionally "locked in", while I was already vendor locked-in and condemned to be using IntelliJ forever.
I was so wrong - not only have I found everything I needed, and more, I have developed a true hacker's mindset. Honestly, the only regret I still carry today, even after years of Emacs use, is that I did not attempt to learn it sooner. I no longer experience FOMO - I can easily pick up IntelliJ whenever I want again, I just haven't found a real, pragmatic reason to do so. In fact, I do fire it up on occasion, just to get the feel of how things evolving there, to steal some good ideas, etc.
> and IdeaVIM
Gary Bernhardt famously said - "There's no such thing as vim-mode". And to the degree, he was right - pretty much every editor/IDE that tries to integrate Vim features invariable ends up having glaring deficiencies. IdeaVIM is good enough, but only to the point - for an expert vimmer it may feel annoying. VSCode vim experience is similar, and Sublime as well - there's really no good comparison between them to say which one is really "better", they all have a spectrum of weird, quirky behaviors. There's one notable exception - Evil-mode in Emacs is fantastically good - sometimes you even forget that it's not a built-in feature, but a third-party extension, an afterthought.
> shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command
In Emacs, you can bind keys to anything, conversely - everything is a command - every keypress, every mouse click and mouse-scroll. And since Emacs is inherently a modal editor, you can do stuff like binding commands to a double, triple, etc. keypresses. Like for example, when I'm typing fast, to autofix most recent typo I'd just tap comma twice - this is just one example of unbelievably fast way to stay focused.
Most devs, once they find their favorite tool would settle with it and don't even explore other options. "I don't have time for that.", "I don't want to be building my editor", "I am already so good with what I have, why?", they would say. My suggestion is to always stay skeptical of current choices and curious about unknown. It's not the concrete implementations, but rather abstract ideas that may grant some surprising and unexpected benefits.