The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a den…
aquaemacs was helpful for me when I was new to emacs backin ‘07. When I forgot some commands, having a gui with menus was handy.
Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)
Neovim suffers from the Javascript kids mode of development. Constant change, constant churn, the mirage of stability always behind the corner, you always require third-party packages for functionality that should be core, completely erasing the Lindy effect of vim proper. It’s a bit sad Neovim has stolen the thunder from the original work of Moolenaar & co. My guess is that neovim will splinter itself down the line…
When did you last look at the neovim ecosystem? Because what you describe is the opposite of what's happened recently. The core has been getting more stable over time, with fewer breakages, and more essential functionality has been added, such as LSP support, completion, and a package manager, with plans to add more.
TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation of the same. And compare-windows looks really handy. I was about to write a note in my init file to my future self telling me to start using that, but then I saw there is already a note there from my past self, telling me about compare-windows. scroll-all-mode seems useful, but it seems to only handle keyboard scrolling, not mouse-wheel?
Can you explain more what's wrong with the Neovim ecosystem? I just switched from Doom Emacs to Neovim and my impression of Neovim has been much better. (I get that Emacs has a much more powerful backbone, I just realized that I didn't really need that power; I just want a good text editor)
I think Neovim itself has been stabilizing quite a bit in terms of upgrade breakage. A common reason for breakage is/was: - Neovim changes some API (deprecating, ...). - User upgrades Neovim and theres some incompability, OR user upgrade plugin and that plugin assumes a much newer version of Neovim. (I've often seen Neovim plugins "mandate" either the latest stable Neovim or even HEAD). But: 1. Neovim has been includ…
Yeah the lack of basic features in core meant core functionality was forced to use plugins with varying levels of documentation and commitments to stability (in some cases sending breaking changes before the supported neovim version even reached the arch repos). I'm glad to see neovim is improving in that aspect.
LSPs keep getting reimplemented, package managers keep getting reimplemented. It's a bit like the react version of text editors. I used it more than I use emacs, but I agree with the assessment of doom emacs vs neovim.
neovim core has most of what you need for LSPs. The only thing missing is server-specific configuration (e.g. binary name, flags), which you can copy from nvim-lspconfig or write yourself. There's also a native package manager in the core.
It literally wasn't the case until relatively recently. It's an improvement in stability for the future, but the fact that before we had plug, then lazy, then finally we now have a built in one doesn't support the case necessarily the neovim ecosystem has a lot of churn.
I hope with these new built in alternatives that will change.
Neovim suffers from the Javascript kids mode of development. Constant change, constant churn, the mirage of stability always behind the corner, you always require third-party packages for functionality that should be core, completely erasing the Lindy effect of vim proper. It’s a bit sad Neovim has stolen the thunder from the original work of Moolenaar & co. My guess is that neovim will splinter itself down the line…
That’s a serious misreading of the NeoVim ecosystem, and I’d bet good money against your predictions coming true.
I've been seeing improvements lately other than the treesitter debacle, but this was literally the case 1 year ago.
TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation of the same. And compare-windows looks really handy. I was about to write a note in my init file to my future self telling me to start using that, but then I saw there is already a note there from my past self, telling me about compare-windows. scroll-all-mode seems useful, but it seems to only handle keyboard scrolling, not mouse-wheel?
...except ruler-mode uses dragging of middle mouse button to move the fill column, which on my system scrolls.
All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix. I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes,…
I use both Emacs ( have used it for decades ) and began using Neovim recently. Neovim seems fairly reasonable. Using the LazyVim distribution of Neovim and it works quite well for my purposes.
Distros help a lot shielding you from the churn, but lazyvim is maintained by folke who I hear loves breaking changes. Back when I used lazyvim I remember people complaining that he swapped out some major component randomly, I think it was auto complete.
Respect where it's due to folke, he's been pushing the neovim ecosystem forward incredibly fast. The bleeding edge just ain't everyone's style though.