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I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.
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I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…
> There’s really nothing killer in Emacs 1. Org mode 2. Magit 3. Wdired 4. Synergy between various components (shameless plug: https://mbork.pl/2023-01-30_The_benefits_of_everything_being... )
2. Magit - Tim Pope is the pope of Vim plugins and fugitive is easily as good or better than Magit. I have never had any issue doing any sort of complex task in git or fixing conflicting using fugitive.
3. Wdired - Tim Pope again has vim-vinegar to improve netrw. Never had a problem or thought about manipulating directories inside of Vim.
4. Again, if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything. And more importantly, if there's something that Emacs can't do you've screwed yourself because you haven't built an environment around many distinct tools on the command line and it's going to be awkward to integrate.
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The default cursor movement commands probably predate emacs. Such that you are used to readline defaults. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083753 is the first post I'm finding on that. That said, I'm curious what the weight of emacs was on you? If it was that you were wanting to be in the other editor, than it makes sense that you should stay in the other editor. But this is no different than a lot of things. I…
> what the weight of emacs was on you What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just using an IDE. But that's j…
Even more amusing, I'm fairly certain I had more customization in vim before I decided I wanted to learn lisp. What ultimately killed my customization in all things, was I felt like I was customizing on top of a very shaky foundation. Emacs/vim are stable enough, of course. But building/packaging software is basically a giant playground.
I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.
That is, unless you're talking about launching emacs each time you want to edit a single file, then emacs won't load instantly like vi will.
I like the idea of emacs, but I notice its warmest advocates often make excuses for its slowness. If an editor doesn’t respond instantly I don’t want to use it.
This is a good article about the problem https://discourse.doomemacs.org/t/why-is-emacs-doom-slow/83/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…
Use both heavily. Vim is fantastic for editing one off files. Emacs on the other hand is fantastic to work on a computer for a long period of time. I do use evil mode, as I do think it's a much better way to work in a file. Project management, magit, org-mode, being able to edit functionality of the editor within couple of mins to adjust for an temporary change/or indefinitely is what keeps me coming back to emacs. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git…
> some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable. Over SSH? Did you turn on ssh connection sharing in ssh config? > ControlMaster auto > ControlPersist yes > ControlPath /tmp/ssh-%u-%r@%h:%p massive speedup when you do this, otherwise it starts a new connection for every operation.
I've used emacs daily for maybe 15 years (and not as daily before that). I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's certainly the most customizable editor I can think of, but over time, that can be a burden. And its age means... the APIs are often not very intuitive. The terminology is often a bit strange. I dunno. I can see why folks use VSCode.
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How many people have you met?
282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config. I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
Some people like to customize their environment to their exact specifications. Others will use whatever is available and never change it.
That is not required. Although default Emacs is pretty barebones (from a modern interface standpoint, not features) one can get a pretty good kickstart by using something like Spacemacs or Doom emacs and only sprinkling a bit of configuration here and there.
I too had a pile of config accrued over years - mostly porting features from other editors to Emacs. After adding Doom, I have just a few lines, it does all the rest.
The point is - usually on other editors you need to either wait for someone to create a "plugin" to do what you need, or you need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a small task. In Emacs, it's extremely easy to create functions that will do tasks for you. And that gets addictive.