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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#121

Post by Lyngbakr »

I love Emacs & it's my go-to editor, but I struggle to offer a solid, logical reason why.

I only use a handful of packages, a smidge of Org mode, minimal customisation, & run Emacs in the terminal, so switching to something more modern should surely give me everything I need & many more features in spades. But nothing else scratches the itch despite my best efforts to move to something else.

Perhaps for me Emacs is like an old pair of slippers: comfy, familiar, does what I need it to without fuss. I can't say whether it's a good choice for anyone else, but this grey beard engineer likes it.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#122

Post by ocimbote »

xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

> I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.

VSCode? It's got its fan base and it's quite vocal. Actually, Didn't VSCode collate the majority of the former Atom users, as Atom collated the majority of SublimeText before it?

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#123

Post by raverbashing »

dmitriid wrote: post #114
raverbashing wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, with more experience I have realized that most customization is not better A certain level yes, but doesn't need to be all, end all VSCode solves most of my issues. "oh but in Emacs you can do..." a thing that I either don't need, or I don't care about or I can do using a web service or some other offline program or maybe even a VSCode plugin or a short vim script.

> "oh but in Emacs you can do..." a thing that I either don't need, or I don't care about or or it's already available in pretty much any IDE out of the box. Most people advocating for emacs or vim usually have no idea what a modern IDE is, and pretend modern IDEs have not surpassed win3.1 notepad in terms of functionality.

Yes, that's a good reminder.

And I agree, a lot of those heavy advocates live in a bubble

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#124

Post by zelphirkalt »

qwertox wrote: post #76
xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

When I open Android Studio I often think: "Man, how lucky we developers are, we have such great tools to do our work." I thought the same about Visual Studio with Whole Tomato's Visual Assist. And VS Code is not quite there, it has a chaotic keyboard navigation + highlighting issues, but it is a pretty good tool, for being a text editor.

It's been a few years since I last touched it, but Android Studio is the last thing, that I would ascribe "great tool" to. I ended up coding views by hand in the XML, because the graphical editor would go out of sync or render things wrongly. As far as I remember I also had to manually code in the XML event listeners for clicks, because the GUI did not offer that. All it did benefit me with was project structure and being able to press a button to put an app on a USB connected phone.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#125

Post by mark_l_watson »

xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

Just wanted to mention: the Community Edition of IntelliJ is open source. I used to routinely build it from source (but haven’t tried that in a few years). You might have fun making the extensions you want for more extension languages.

I have been using Emacs for 40 years and still love it, but I do find myself using VSCode more often now for Python work. Emacs has very good CoPilot support, but it sometimes lags a bit behind the support in VSCode. I also have started using a proprietary MarkDown editor instead of Emacs or VSCode.

For me a big draw of Emacs is that I have it easily configured for almost all programming languages I use.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#126

Post by charcircuit »

gpderetta wrote: post #94
charcircuit wrote: post #30

Emacs is software from the 80s that failed to adapt to the current times. It failed to innovate and address UX issues so its market share devoured.

Market share is not a feature that helps me. A thriving ecosystem and active development is. Emacs doesn't lack either. Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means that you can rely on the GUI being consistent across years instead of having to relearn it every few months.

>Market share is not a feature that helps me.

But it does show what software is generally better.

>A thriving ecosystem and active development is.

Despite being thriving it still is very lacking in code navigation abilities and has poor performance in general. Not to mention the editor grinds to a halt when working on big files due to extensions being poorly optimized.

>Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means that you can rely on the GUI being consistent across years instead of having to relearn it every few months.

The user experience of a product is much more than just the user interface. Emacs requires you to learn elisp and write a whole configuration file by hand or use really clunky menus.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#127

Post by oblio »

omnicognate wrote: post #106
oblio wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your time is so limited, eliminating toil seems essential. The counter point to this is usually: What exactly is your toil as a professional software developer (or associated profession) that is eliminated with a "better"[1] editor in 2023? Refactoring is more powerful with an IDE, for mainstream languages. For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using multi-cursors and a macro languag…

The "toil" is anything involved in software development that's boring and repetitive. There's a computer right there that's for that stuf. My biggest frustrations come when I'm prevented from bringing the power of that computer to bear on a problem that isn't one of the ones envisioned or prioritised by the makers of my tools, and they didn't think to make it easy for me to extend them myself. Emacs isn't an editor,…

> Case in point: at work we use a job scheduler with a horrid web UI. I knocked something together in a couple of hours in emacs that eliminated that pain from my life and allowed me to explore our environments much more freely. If more of my colleagues used emacs they could share in the joy. I don't have anywhere near the time I would need to make something they could use without it.

Other devs would (and regularly do) just whip up something using shell scripts and command line tools, or write their own CLI/TUI/GUI/web service/app for the exact same thing. There are myriad viable ways to automate things.

> Meetings, reporting and "social stuff" isn't much of an issue for me as I've been very clear in every interview I've had that I have no desire to take on managerial responsibilities at any stage of my career.

Meetings, reporting and "social stuff" happen as an individual contributor because you need to sync with customers, peers, bosses, plus customers and bosses also expect you to report your progress. Social stuff isn't going out to lunch or dinner, it' just regular interaction or support.

I'm glad that you get what you want, not everyone does.

I'm just pointing out that there are many ways to happy coding and Emacs is just one of them.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#128

Post by bachmeier »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #95
xlii wrote: post #37

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few. I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back. But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and featur…

I've been using Emacs for 25 years, and I use a stock install and I never even touch the .emacs file. It's just a text editor. For many tasks it has better usability than the competition. This is why I use it. (Not for everything, though, and that's okay.) I'd guess most people are like me. Configuring text editors is not our hobby.

> It's just a text editor.

I'll never understand comments like this. There's a full Lisp implementation available in there. Other text editors don't come with org-mode, either.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#129

Post by charcircuit »

asoneth wrote: post #91
charcircuit wrote: post #30

Emacs is software from the 80s that failed to adapt to the current times. It failed to innovate and address UX issues so its market share devoured.

I agree that Emacs commits a number of unforced errors with regard to its user experience, especially for novice users. My guess is that with some usability studies they could flatten the learning curve substantially and significantly increase their market share with only minimal burden on existing users. Having said that, "market share" doesn't seem like a relevant metric since the community seems perfectly content…

>since the community seems perfectly content being niche.

This is just admitting defeat. There is no reason Emacs couldn't be the number one editor right now. GNU projects in general all tend to fail to innovate and seem to ignore the last couple of decades of learnings.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#130

Post by zelphirkalt »

abdellah123 wrote: post #109

I switched (over 7 years) from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to vim to neovim, to VSCode and back to neovim and even tried Helix before settling onto (Doom) Emacs a couple of weeks ago (lol) Seriously, it feels unproductive a bit at first. But the productivity potential is 10x higher than any other tool or editor out there. With org-mode, Magit, Projectile and dired, I already feel more productive than in VSCode or neovi…

If you want to combine note taking for future self, learning, coding, and org-mode, I recommend another rabbithole: Literate Programming in org-mode. The features supported are very comprehensive.
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