171–180 of 301 posts
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I occasionally need a calculator, but I just evaluate elisp expressions in *scratch*. What am I missing by not using calc?
Fewer keypresses. RPN input is very efficient that way. Something like (sqrt (log (* 3 (+ 9 7))) in calc is "9 RET 7 + 3 * L Q". (Sorry about the bad example, I'm short on time.)
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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.
Okay? Neovim and Lite XL ship with full Lua implementations. VSCode ships with a full JS implementation.
Being scriptable is not unique to Emacs. Though I do think the combination of - big ecosystem (missing for Lite) - scripting freedom (missing for VSC, iirc its plugin APIs are kinda limiting) - GUI (neovim) is pretty much unique.
A lot of other editors are also extensible, either via scripting or dynamically linking native code.
The only reason Org is unique to Emacs is that it's "too large to clone", i.e. it'd be a lot of work. I think a lot of editors could provide the same features with a plugin, given sufficient effort.
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Spacemacs got lots configured out of the box, which allows to keep this workflow but still not miss out on much.
I don't care about LSP and today's iteration of "IntelliSense", so I'm not missing out much in any case. Since most people today are more than happy to code in Jyputer notebooks (yuck), I guess I'm not actually that weird.
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…
What sets Emacs apart for me is that it, unlike a lot of "unix philosophy" tools, it deliberately takes a sort of systems approach. The often used analogy is that an architect never just designs rooms in isolation, but only changes a room in the context of the house. It's the whole arrangement that matters, not its parts. And you can't infer the performance of the former from the latter. The minimal approach to have…
I really like your point about systems approach -- it's definitely a very holistic, cohesive piece of software. This is probably one of the reasons that it can be very difficult to add new features to Emacs.
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…
My main gripe is dealing with several major modes at once, I still find that Emacs isn't the best at that.
I will say for anyone curious about Emacs, do try it out in your spare time. It's so much fun to customize and play around with.
I'm more of a vim guy, but "I get it". I started using these "serious" editors back in college and eventually settled with vim over emacs. I don't wanna get into the whole editor wars - it's like picking a Pokemon at the start of the game. I went through the whole phase of adding a bunch of plugins, custom macros and have a huge .vimrc file that, once in a while, would break if I was using the wrong vim variant {vi,…
This encapsulates my feelings completely, haha. Both require so much investment and you spend a lot of time with them, just like the pokemon you pick at the beginning.
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Get better hardware? Don't go cheap on your development system. I'm on an Apple M1 device and have barely noticed it.
That's kinda like a traffic engineer saying "I always get stuck in a massive traffic jam while driving back home. I know, we'll add another lane to the highway." If a tool runs poorly on commodity hardware the solution isn't "get better hardware," but "improve the tool." ...okay, unless the tool absolutely requires specialized capabilities, like a neural network which needs a dedicated GPU for number crunching.
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But Emacs is incredibly light for the current generation hardware... and it's been incredibly light for probably 15 years or more. On my "small" laptop, I only use Emacs... Trying to run IntelliJ or VSCode makes the laptop burning hot and forces the fan to keep running. With Emacs, no matter what I do, it's always quiet and cool.
One gripe I have with Emacs is that it doesn't boot instantly enough. Annoys me every time I edit a Git commit message. Though it's not horrible enough that I found the courage to set up an Emacs server, as easy as it is… Anyway, it would be nice if it could just boot instantly by default.
You must have accidentally closed it. Closing Emacs or your Web browser are common mistakes, and as you will surely have realized almost immediately, you needed to re-open either program within minutes.
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> 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.
> There's a full Lisp implementation available in there. Okay? Neovim and Lite XL ship with full Lua implementations. VSCode ships with a full JS implementation. Being scriptable is not unique to Emacs. Though I do think the combination of - big ecosystem (missing for Lite) - scripting freedom (missing for VSC, iirc its plugin APIs are kinda limiting) - GUI (neovim) is pretty much unique. A lot of other editors are a…