Use GNU Emacs

I used it for many years without issues, give WSL a try, it even works in graphical mode.

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, vim, nvim}. For the sake of this argument, emacs users face some form of the same too.

It got to a point where all my hardcore configurations made my editor experience diverge even further away from the promised "out of the box" experience, and not on par with autocomplete functionalities available in modern IDEs like VSCode.

So now I'm on VSCode. A M1 MacBook can handle it, so I told myself to quit being a masochist, and that itself saves me hours especially navigating a big and complex codebase. But I remember how to use vim, and that comes in handy if I have to SSH into some remote machine and make some tweaks to scripts.

You have an unnecessary word in there…

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 feature discoverability. Hell, probably if IntelliJ toolset would allow me to customize it deeper with Lua/Lisp/JS/whatever I’d probably switch in a jiffy.

I compare Emacs to vinyls or paper books. It requires investment, in many cases it is worse than competition and requires more energy to just be on par. But it is absolutely lovable. Vinyl record comparison - they are expensive, heavy, require a lot of maintenance but for specific type of people it makes their heart skip a beat when they take it from the sleeve.

That’s why people are constantly talking about their Emacs. Same with vim or nvim. I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.

So yeah, if you’re not into it just keep in mind that like some freak who spend their weekend on polishing rims of dream come true 1959 Fiat 500, some of us spend their time with Emacs.

Don’t get bullied into it, don’t get FOMO about it, but please don’t spoil our fun.

You’re always welcome to join in.

computers dont have to cost x000 bucks to be good enough.