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Use GNU Emacs

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Re: Use GNU Emacs

#181

Post by ParetoOptimal »

oblio wrote: post #127
omnicognate wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

The difference is time of development and flexibility of tge emacs result using the same universal plain text interface you use in emacs every day for me.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#182

Post by ubermonkey »

teddyh wrote: post #166
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…

Please name any other comparable IDE or editor which is also free software (and also preferrably developed by more than a single company).

Most people don't care about that as a qualification.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#183

Post by billfruit »

tronx wrote: post #174
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 have only used IDEs and tried getting into emacs because I heard so many times how great it is, but it was the learning curve paired with the lack of good tutorials for beginners that made me eventually give up.

Emacs tutorial is quite good, IMO. It is interactive and built into Emacs itself.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#184

Post by billfruit »

kqr wrote: post #3

The Ingebrigtsen quote is meaningful. One should think of "using Emacs" not like "using Vim" but like "using the JVM." Emacs is a powerful platform for building hackable, command-and-ui driven applications. You may not like the text editor that ships with a default Emacs install, but you don't have to use it! There are others (e.g. evil.) There are also other applications. Some of my favourites are - calc (desktop RP…

I would also add ztree-diff to that list.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#185

Post by ParetoOptimal »

adastra22 wrote: post #53
thom wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also get the benefit of everyone else’s hard work with Emacs. One of the differences is that it’s such an established ecosystem, that instead of individual extensions just getting better, with Emacs they’ve yielded shared abstractions that make _new_ extensions trivial and much more consistent than with VSCode (which is nevertheless still an excellent editor these days). I also don’t understand why people think s…

I think you're missing the point. With vscode I literally don't have to do anything. It just magically gets better every time I start it up. Most people I know who use vim or emacs don't have it setup to auto-update extensions, and even if they did they wouldn't automatically fetch and configure those new extensions you mention. What I'm objecting to is the very idea of a highly customizable editor.

> It just magically gets better every time I start it up.

Some of my coworkers violently agree, but at least 20-30% get annoyed when autoupdate removes/ changes some feature (pane splitting recently I think) and they have to adapt their workflow.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#186

Post by oblio »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #181
oblio wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. The difference is time of development and flexibility of tge emacs result using the same universal plain text interface you use in emacs every day for me.

True, but you're giving up composability outside of Emacs. Think of CI/CD pipelines, for example.

I mean, you could probably run Emacs as part of your CI/CD pipeline, but it would be a bit... weird?

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#187

Post by geysersam »

phonebucket wrote: post #141
geysersam wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to use VSCode for the completion and other polished conveniences that just work. I detest having to manually configure anything. But vim moves and keybinds are just too good. If there was a combination that actually worked well, I'd switch in a heartbeat. But so far I haven't encountered an option with all of: * vim bindings (no compromises) * great completion / IDE experience * no configuration Currently my…

You can fully embed Neovim into VSCode: https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim , which seems like it might work for you?

Thanks, I'll check it out!

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#188

Post by IncRnd »

bachmeier wrote: post #128
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people get a car in order to drive from point A to point B. Not everyone puts a bra, rear-spoiler, fancy wheels, and other customizations on their car. I imagine the people who do those things also wonder why other people don't.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#189

Post by scroot »

Lots of talk about "fiddling with configs" here, but in my experience it's like a slow evolution over time: you adjust things here and there as you need them. That's a malleable system. It's not a constant tinkering, but a willingness and ability to adjust as you go.

Re: Use GNU Emacs

#190

Post by dan-g »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #135
brabel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DOOM Emacs addresses this issue (and is an incredible, if opinionated, Emacs “platform”): https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

> Gotta go fast. Startup and run-time performance are priorities. Doom goes beyond by modifying packages to be snappier and load lazier.

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