The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
1–10 of 267 posts
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#2I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different.
Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This starts with (nowadays) non-conformant shortcuts, includes window/buffer management (the terminology alone is archaic: panes are windows and windows are frames), and ends with elisp, which even Lisp programmers themselves rebuke.
But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away. Stuff that has accumulated for many decades and that is the reason why we're sticking with it: Everything else feels very limited in comparison.
And it's not just the "big" things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call "sort-lines", because of course I can, I know that I'm not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things.
Admittedly, I haven't tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it's a bit hard for me to imagine that you won't need to come face to face with "emacsism" at some time.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#3Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS.
I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort.
This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional. Otherwise we can simply use uemacs or mg and benefit from faster startup and lower footprint.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#4I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…
With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud).
I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm not trying to master the writing of a doc.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#5Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…
I use emacs to interact with other machines or remote boxes. All of my customizations and preferences are magically applied to remote files. For example, I wanted to edit a file in the Hetzner rescue image and I just opened it using tramp and wrote my changes.
If I were to use emacs as just an editor, I’d probably stick with sublime or vscode or something. The same UX across many common workflows is precisely why I prefer emacs.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#6I'm in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can't imagine switching... don't think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are really open about learning something entirely different. Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start "making sense" in the modern world. This s…
With respect to LaTeX, I only started to use it semi-recently in the cloud and I'd recommend it to anyone (but only in the cloud). I don't want to master an editor anymore. I want to get work done. Pretty much the same with LaTeX. When I want to improve something in a doc, I look it up and do that. When I go back to the doc later, I don't always remember what that magic meant. But that's ok, I'm writing a doc. I'm no…
I don't want to deeply learn an editor myself anymore, too, but that being said I am still extremely glad that the past decades have made me proficient in emacs. The editor is just one of the most important tools for me.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#7Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…
What do you suspect the "macs" is short for?
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#8This is why I don't bother with emacs, I just don't have the time to sink in the first place. Now that I have a young family and hobbies outside of work, I don't have the time to spend hours fixing and tinkering a setup or learning an already opinionated set up like spacemacs etc. I just use an IDE which is already set up with good defaults and I have a well settled vim config for driving remote machines or changing something on my main PC. I also cannot get on with the shells available in emacs. They feel slow and have to many quirks and I don't get that with vscode / intellij.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#9It does kind of bother me that Org doesn't have a particularly good formal spec.
There are a ton of parsers out there, which is great, but there is no Emacs-independent set of tests you can run against a parser to figure out if it's compliant. Ultimately, the Org format is what Emacs says it is, and everyone else just tries to play catch-up.
I feel like this is a little bit of a missed opportunity. I use Emacs because I think it's (for me) the best editor that exists today, and it's likely to continue to be the single best editor that exists (for my needs) in the near-to-long-term future. That doesn't mean I'm necessarily pleased about how much Emacs tends to suck features into itself and how hard it is to get them out.
I don't like that the "canonical" version of Org-mode is Emacs dependent. I don't like that when I manage my life through Org-Agenda it becomes needlessly hard to work with other tools unless I sit down and find a partially functioning Org parser on Github that may or may not be abandoned. Yes, Org is plain text, but being plain text isn't good enough, it also needs to be easily parseable into a consistent AST or formal data structure on multiple platforms. I don't like that when I write a tool in Emacs Lisp that I can't run it headlessly anymore, and that it now requires a massive pile of dependencies to run.
The Tern language server was a good development on this front, it's good for language formatting tools to be separate from editors. I wish more parts of Emacs would work that way. But it's not so much of a problem that I'm willing to give up Emacs to in order to cobble together a system that adheres more to the Unix philosophy of being more composable. The lock-in effect is definitely real, it's just that Emacs also happens to be good enough right now that I don't have anything else I particularly want to move to, which makes the lock-in a lot less annoying.
I'd move off of Emacs if I felt like any of the other editors were better, but I don't, for me none of them come even close. Emacs has a huge community and a huge featureset that dwarfs other editors, and it also has this core of flexibility and transparency and extensibility that I feel even "configurable" editors like Visual Studio and Atom haven't really caught up with. But importantly, me saying that Emacs is the best editor around is not quite the same thing as me saying that Emacs is good.
I don't have any regrets picking up Emacs, at all, it was a great choice and it's paid off tremendously, and I think it'll continue to pay off in the future. But I do wish there was a better editor out there.
Re: The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
#10Here is an idea: Stop adding crazy marcos and customization and use it like an editor instead of an OS. I understand this is a very controversial idea, but I have learned that since I'm switching machines and using remote boxes all the time, customising everything 100% to my liking is neither possible or worth the effort. This of course requires the emacs team to make the barebone emacs a little bit more functional.…
I revisit my emacs config once every year or so, but otherwise I leave it along and focus on using emacs instead of tweaking emacs. From what I've heard, some emacs users seem to get addicted to tweaking emacs, so much so that it distracts them from their real work. But that's just not something I can relate to myself, nor is it something I've witnessed from my emacs-using coworkers and friends. I've also perceived an uptick in hand-wringing about such emacs-tweaking in the past few years, seeming to correlate with an uptick in handwringing against GPL licenses and GNU in general, and I wonder if agitation with RMS has something to do with it.