[HN Gopher] Emacs 2011-2023
___________________________________________________________________
Emacs 2011-2023
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-04-14 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bastibe.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (bastibe.de)
| tptacek wrote:
| Before you get all smug, Vim people, this applies just as much to
| you as to us. :P
|
| I'll probably never let go of Emacs, but have encouraged both of
| my kids to avoid it and use VSCode instead.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I would, however, encourage anyone to learn the GNU readline
| keyboard shortcuts. I don't use emacs but I think they are
| emacs adjacent. I've come across those shortcuts in many many
| places (that used readline or not). There's also rlwrap which
| wraps any non readline REPL.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://discuss.kakoune.com/uploads/default/original/1X/f458.
| ..
| baq wrote:
| I've jumped ship from vim to vscode ~5 years ago, for better or
| worse, after having been a vim person for previous ~20.
|
| There are still things I miss which are impossible to replicate
| in vscode without breaking it, but I feel the out of the box
| experience and reduction in configuration complexity is a
| rather large net positive.
|
| vim is still what I use to edit stuff via ssh and in docker
| images, though.
| fragmede wrote:
| I wouldn't say I've jumped ship, simply because I'm still
| using both. I've got vim in a terminal and a vscode window
| up, and it's not seamless, but I wield the two together to
| get the job done. Debugging is done in vscode, but vscode
| doesn't have all the vim stuff in, so in still attached
| there, plus it runs in a terminal and vscode doesn't.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Do you use one of the vim plugins in vscode?
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've been using Emacs for as long as the author and I've also
| never really recommended it to anyone. I've never met anyone I
| could imagine going through with it. I feel like if you're the
| type to use Emacs you'll find Emacs yourself.
| adamc wrote:
| I think that's probably true. You have to dig to see what's
| good about Emacs, and to get past the initial "this is so
| alien" impression.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| I don't think it applies. Vi's key idea is a composable text
| editing language, and it's transferrable between editors, with
| a few quirks but mostly intact. (although there are new editors
| that iterate on this idea, and they have their own, better
| designed, but incompatible text editing languages).
|
| Emacs' key idea is a composable environment, which translates
| poorly to non-LISP languages and other programmable editors due
| to their more rigid design. It's really an operating system
| with a non-conventional architecture.
| Bjartr wrote:
| As the joke goes: Emacs is a great OS, only lacking a decent
| text editor
| smartmic wrote:
| Why must it always be either or and not in symbiosis? I
| understand that the author has to use different tools as required
| by the employer or external constraints. He even lists the
| various purposes Emacs serves in his digital life, such as org-
| journal, code editing, etc. And isn't that exactly a point for
| Emacs? Emacs is not just a code editor or an IDE, but a whole
| operating system around plain text. So even if I have to use
| different IDEs, I find enough reasons to use Emacs for personal
| knowledge management, as a Postman replacement, for journaling,
| and much more. All in all, the reasons to move 100% away from
| Emacs are not convincing to me. If everything else that Emacs
| offers has failed, including its hacker friendliness, there is at
| least the ethics to it for which I will keep it cherished among a
| dark, propriety neighborhood that a system that provides Visual
| Studio is setting.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Because it's hard. I use tons of tools in my digital ecosystem,
| and the divide is tiring sometimes. Tool switching adds a
| little overhead, which can become _not little_ when you 're
| trying to do a lot of things because life demands it.
|
| I use Eclipse as my main IDE, but for smaller stuff I use KATE
| on Linux and BBEdit in macOS. Similarly, my knowledge base has
| to be divided between two tools.
|
| When you have time, this is no burden. But if you don't, then
| it starts to bother you. Also, creating digital systems
| requires time and experience.
|
| However, I'm _very_ with you on VSCode thing. It 's a
| proprietary tool looks like a free one, and keeping people
| imprisoned without they realize. As a fun side note, VSCode's
| Java language server is a headless Eclipse instance.
| fragmede wrote:
| VSCode looks really Free, in what way is it proprietary that
| you're thinking of? In which language are you using it?
| johnny22 wrote:
| vscodium is really Free. vscode's default python language
| server for example is not open. I think the remote
| connection stuff isn't either.
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's free as in beer, not Free as in speech. Tons of plug-
| ins are Microsoft proprietary, or being closed down step by
| step.
|
| I'm not and won't be using it.
| thiht wrote:
| They're extensions, nothing prevents you from
| reimplementing proprietary extensions as open source
| packages. As a matter of fact, there's probably an oss
| alternative for each proprietary extension already. Maybe
| it's not on par with the proprietary extension, but
| then... work on it?
| Y_Y wrote:
| Exactly. At work I have Emacs running in WSL, after a bit of
| tweaking it runs almost as fast as on Linux and doesn't give
| any trouble. I also have VS Code for when some coworker wants
| to work on something together and asks for it. You don't have
| to use only one of them!
|
| What also helps is keybindings. I like vim so I use evil and
| whatever the VSC equivalent is, and most other commands are
| done with a "leader key" in both editors, so there's not a big
| difference in ergonomy.
|
| It's really not much trouble to have these two setups co-
| existing. In fact I'd be upset if I had to choose only one.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > Why must it always be either or and not in symbiosis?
|
| At the end of the day, it's just another tool with its own
| weight. And if the weight becomes bigger than the benefit, it's
| time to move on.
| adamc wrote:
| Yeah, this. And sure, with enough effort, I could "scratch my
| own itch" and fix whatever bothers me, but it is often not a
| trivial effort, and afterwards... it's still emacs, and
| whatever my fix was, I have to remember how it works forever
| to navigate other challenges that will come up.
|
| It is more pragmatic to simply find a tool that works for
| whatever I'm doing and call it a day.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Why must it always be either or?
|
| OP explains as follows:
|
| >as my Emacs usage waned, so its ancient keyboard shortcuts
| started to become a liability. I started mis-typing Emacs
| things in Visual Studio, and hitting Windows shortcuts in
| Emacs.
| submeta wrote:
| I use (basic) Emacs shortcuts everywhere via Karabiner
| Elements. Caps is control. And Enter is control when pressed
| with another key.
| hollerith wrote:
| The point is that the basic Emacs shortcuts don't work in
| VS or VSCode. Also your solution does nothing for the
| "temptation" to use Windows shortcuts in Emacs.
| nvy wrote:
| >Emacs is not just a code editor or an IDE, but a whole
| operating system around plain text.
|
| This meme really needs to die.
|
| I use emacs a lot, but the attitude that it's not just a text
| editor leads people to accept UX mediocrity.
|
| Emacs has fallen behind VS Code in many ways, including text
| editing.
| sporedro wrote:
| I never understood the all-in approach either. Different tools
| handle things better.
|
| I personally am using a mix of tools with my editors being vim
| for editing files quickly on cli, emacs for magit (honestly I
| just use it as a git tool and it works amazing, the startup and
| leaving it running 24/7 is no issue on a modern computer),
| intellij for java (it just works), and vscode for python,
| terraform, javascript/node.
|
| I see absolutely no issue with this setup, I'm not sure I would
| recommend it to everyone but if you use a tool, that you feel
| works better for even a specific case why not use it for that.
| If new tools popup in the future I'm always willing to try
| them, if they work better I'll add them to my workflow.
| pizlonator wrote:
| Emacs has really funky (and useful) keyboard shortcuts and
| behaviors that make it awkward to switch to anything else.
| adamc wrote:
| It took a few weeks, but it wasn't that hard to switch, and
| I'd used emacs for going on 20 years. That's not to say there
| aren't things it did better than VSCode -- it's a given that
| any switch between tools will have trade-offs. But it wasn't
| horrible.
|
| Escaping Emacs terminology ("buffers", "frames", etc.) was a
| big win, as far as I'm concerned.
| bitwize wrote:
| Few reasons:
|
| * Keybindings are different, and switching back and forth adds
| friction.
|
| * You get _looks_ if you use Emacs. From those over 45 it 's
| like "I remember that from my DEC days; why use it now in the
| age of Eclipse/JetBrains/Atom/VSCode?" From those under 45 it's
| more like "You're using that ancient thing from the 70s?!"
| There are probably Facebook memes out there with an Emacs
| screenshot and the caption "If you use this to code you're a
| psychopath." Social pressure these days is against Emacs, so if
| you're going to use something else, may as well go with the
| flow and use something else, not something else _and_ Emacs and
| be thought a weirdo.
| adamc wrote:
| I like open source, but a lot of other considerations are
| higher on my list of priorities.
| rwilson4 wrote:
| Thanks, Bastien, for org-journal. I've used it almost every day
| for the last 4 years. Perhaps you'll find a new use for Emacs
| someday.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| VS Code people: how do you not go crazy when you try out a new
| language? I just opened up a love2d project I've been working on
| and everything has error squiggles. Do y'all just spend hours
| getting your tooling figured out every time you try something new
| or do you just disable diagnostics?
| kirubakaran wrote:
| I once happened to be with a coworker setting up VSCode on his
| new laptop. I was shocked by the reckless abandon with which he
| installed all kinds of third party extensions.
| chuckadams wrote:
| First thing I do with a new Jetbrains IDE is add a bunch of
| plugins. It's pretty much the way most IDEs roll.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Do you worry about malware?
| baq wrote:
| I guess we don't until there are supporting extensions.
|
| Or we switch back to vim.
| chuckadams wrote:
| It's not hugely different than working with a new project in a
| fancy IDE, once you figure out adding generated sources, aiming
| the tools at the right config files if everything's not in the
| root, etc. If you're lucky they've set up a docker-compose.yml
| to get started with, otherwise you have a couple hours work
| ahead. It's a one-time cost you don't have to pay again unless
| you wipe and clone the project from scratch.
|
| I vastly prefer IntelliJ, but project setup on vscode has never
| been a major speed bump in my shop.
| dplyukhin wrote:
| What would you do in Emacs? The reason I switched to VS Code
| was exactly because I could instantly get set up with most
| languages by installing an extension, instead of messing around
| with Elisp configs and a hodgepodge of packages. I couldn't
| even figure out how to set up a working Java environment in
| Emacs.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| I don't really do anything fancy. I use citre and ctags for
| goto definition and use buffer and tag based autocomplete.
|
| Spending time fiddling with extensions makes me want to stick
| forks in my eyes, but I'm genuinely curious if other people
| just generally suck it up and get it figured out or if they
| just ignore error squiggles a lot.
|
| I would never go anywhere near Java with Emacs though, I
| would just bust out Intellij or Eclipse for that.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Just ignore it. Errors will be fixed or deactivated with time.
| Especially with something new, there are already enough things
| to figure out, error squiggles are just another bag of noise.
| valcron1000 wrote:
| > love2d
|
| For Lua last time I tried I just did not install any Lua
| extension, just use the native syntax highlighting and move on.
| satran wrote:
| I moved into management 5 years back. And since then I have
| reduced the amount of coding to a degree that I don't write
| anything that goes to production. Most of my coding is scripts to
| automate something or discovering something personally. I juggle
| between Emacs, vim, and VS Code for many of those; VS code
| especially if I want to navigate code. But Emacs is my daily
| driver. I use plain text files to keep track of things, write
| meeting notes, etc. The one editor that I keep coming back to is
| Emacs. May be it is me, but its flexibility is unbeaten. And as
| strange it sounds to say this these days, but Emacs is light. So
| much so than VScode. It isn't vi/vim, but it is snappy to get
| started.
|
| Just recently I wanted the M-x shell to support OSC 8 links(you
| can click them to go to a file), and all it required was to write
| a small function to do so. This function goes into the thousand
| odd lines of lisp that I have curated over a 16 years. It is an
| editor that keeps evolving.
| adr1an wrote:
| I went through something similar, I enjoyed emacs TRAMP for so
| long... One day, I saw a colleague opening remote vscode through
| SSH. Turns out I hadn't seen that on vscodium... it's kinda
| proprietary. (Should I care?) It's work! It needs to get done!!
| (: and another feat was magit, but that I left behind when I
| started using gitui ... I still highly appreciate and respect
| emacs. Maybe one day vscode will turn shit because, hey! it
| happens, and emacs will still be there for me <3
| globular-toast wrote:
| I'm at the point where I just wouldn't take a job if I didn't
| think I could use Emacs. I'd be hobbled to such an extent. Like
| carpenter unable to use a hammer.
|
| When I first entered the market 15 years ago there were loads of
| Windows only places that were completely out of the question for
| me. The world then seemed to change and it was easy to get a good
| job for a while. But the forces of darkness never went away, it
| seems. I always said I'd rather just quit computers then do
| anything Microsoft. I hope I don't have to put my money where my
| mouth is, but I'm still prepared to.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The need for grown-up computing is not ever going away. It gets
| less visible, harder to see against all the noise.
| koito17 wrote:
| I wonder how Magit was replaced. Magit is the sole reason I can
| use Git at all. I have never used Git from the command line, and
| every time I see non-Emacs-using coworkers trying to use git, it
| always seems like a mess the moment they do anything more
| complicated than switching branches.
|
| I remember briefly using the Git features in Xcode and IntelliJ,
| but both were pretty convoluted and lacked specific features I
| use daily, such as staging ranges of a diff (rather than an
| entire diff). There's also little things that make Magit
| essential to me, like cherry-picking a commit from the reflog
| having virtually identical UI to cherry-picking in general. Never
| bothered to try learning how to these things in Xcode or IntelliJ
| since the interface was complicated enough just to create commits
| and view a log.
|
| I don't use VS Code, but my coworkers that do use VS Code seem to
| use git entirely from a terminal window. So I am guessing VS Code
| doesn't have a Magit equivalent.
| roryrjb wrote:
| There's edamagit[0] for vscode, it's pretty good! I've been
| using it for a couple of weeks now and haven't needed to touch
| git via the terminal.
|
| 0.
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kahole.m...
| sporedro wrote:
| I come from a vim background and have used vscode and intellij
| as well. But picked up emacs solely due to magit. A coworker
| showed me it and I have to say it's really amazing. Nothing
| really compares to it, the closest I've seen are the cli tools
| "tig" and "lazygit" but magit really outshines them feature
| wise.
|
| There's nothing "similar" to it but vscode does have git tools,
| it just feels really clunky to use imo. Same goes for
| intellij's UI. I guess it works for some people but they sort
| of just hurt my head to look at.
| ak217 wrote:
| VSCode has excellent git and github support (especially with
| the GitHub Pull Requests and GitLens extensions). In my
| workflow, it has surpassed anything Magit had to offer. While I
| still use the command line git extensively, I've come to rely
| on VSCode for a lot of the more complex contextual information
| available when editing, resolving merge conflicts, staging, and
| contextual git history available in popups.
|
| I always leaned on emacs due to its versatility working in
| remote environments on the command line. I still use it
| occasionally, but for me the feature that finally made me
| switch to VSCode as my main daily driver was the remote SSH
| plugin. It's a game changer and the best remote IDE experience
| I've ever had. Then Copilot came out and cemented the change.
|
| I think in general emacs and vi users learn to live with
| substandard UX and legibility issues of the software. I find
| vscode to be better at that. It strikes the right balance on a
| lot of things, in particular I find myself learning new things
| faster and with less frustration because the shortcuts,
| commands, and contextual information are more intuitive and in
| line with my expectations.
| dctoedt wrote:
| I've long used Emacs and org-mode for all my legal writing for
| Web posting, including my course materials (which have turned out
| to be a pretty-long PDF for print-on-demand). I once tried to use
| Microsoft Word, but in really-large documents, Word's internal
| cross-referencing just isn't reliable. So I can't imagine
| ditching Emacs.
|
| (I started using Emacs in law school, and wrote keystroke
| emulators for both Word Perfect BITD and Word. Nowawdays, when
| using Word on others' machines, I have to remember that, say,
| Ctrl-A doesn't go to the beginning of the line.)
| michaeldh wrote:
| It's okay to use different tools. Don't worry about it so much.
|
| FWIW, I spent a lot of time in Notepad++ with my own syntax and
| settings setup for a specific video game I made mods for. And
| then I learned Linux and really bought into BOTH Vim and Emacs.
| And then I stopped playing around with computers and pretty much
| forgot about all of that stuff. No hard feelings.
| submeta wrote:
| I abandoned Emacs for a year or so and used BBEdit for regex-
| replace and VS Code for dev tasks. Also gave up on org-mode and
| org-roam because I could not find a mobile companion. Adopted
| Obsidian for all my note taking use-cases and journaling in
| markdown.
|
| A few weeks ago I asked myself if I can use Emacs as a front end
| for my markdown files in my Obsidian vault. So I started setting
| up Emacs for searching files via counsel-fzf and via ripgrep (I
| can jump to any heading in my markdown files, find any content in
| my 17k+ files, in an instant, using Emacs). I use yasnippet for
| templates.
|
| After a week or so I realize this:
|
| 0. I love writing documents in Emacs, use Elisp to automate my
| workflow, and have all my files available on the go via Obsidian.
|
| 1. Emacs + Elisp are a wonderful platform for all things text.
|
| 2. Markdown is less capabable then org-mode, but it's available
| everywhere.
|
| 3. Org-mode is tied to Emacs, and thus no mobile solution.
|
| 4. Broke down my 5k lines Emacs config file into packages and
| import them. This made it more managable. And now I version
| control my configs and packages. This also made it more
| managable.
|
| I still use VS Code for writing code, BBEdit for regex
| search/replace across files, I just have re-discovered Emacs
| again. It's just unbelievably versatile with the Emacs Lisp
| language. I cannot automate Obsidian just as fast (or at all).
|
| ## Edit
|
| I have said fare-well to Emacs soo many times, just to realize
| how absolutely lovely it is / was, and come back to it. Always.
| And then, with a fresh perspective, appreciating it even more. So
| I don't believe this fella is going to stay away from it :)
|
| ## Edit 2
|
| What boosted my Emacs usage is ChatGPT and Claude 3. I have never
| created that many Emacs packages in my life like in the past two
| weeks or so. With the right prompt and a few iterations I can
| make Emacs do whatever I need it to do. Absolutely stunnig.
| oddthink wrote:
| Interesting! Just over the past month, I've reduced my emacs
| usage a lot. I'd switched to VSCode for most coding a while
| ago, but I still kept my daily journal notes in org-mode, but I
| recently switched to Logseq for that.
|
| I don't know if I'll stick with it, or if it'll get sluggish
| after a while, but right now the searching, rich-text, and pdf-
| annotation seems refreshing.
| mad44 wrote:
| I was also unhappy with emacs breaking across versions, but I
| learnt to adopt to the new and sane keyboard shortcuts for org
| mode. http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2024/01/dude-wheres-my-
| emac...
| bitwize wrote:
| I have just the opposite problem. I've tried Visual Studio Code
| many times, each time wondering if there were some productivity
| benefit I was missing because everybody seems to use and love it.
| I'm just not seeing it. Having Emacs Lisp _right there_ , in
| which I can knock together some automation that smooths the pain
| points out of my workflow, is just too much a benefit.
|
| Visual Studio Code is just aimed at a different kind of developer
| than I am. (ThePrimeagen fans, stay quiet; you risk violating
| someone's code of conduct if you speak up now.) It doesn't work
| the way my mind works, so I will always be a foreigner in its
| lands. Plus, Emacs is just too cozy. It's like a beanbag chair:
| once ensconced in it, you struggle to get out... and you really
| don't want to.
|
| Emacs now has a package called crdt that uses -- you guessed it
| -- CRDTs to provide collaborative editing. I've seen YouTube
| videos of it in use and it seems to work rather well. So you
| _can_ pair program remotely with it, but I don 't pair program
| often enough to need it.
| fhd2 wrote:
| > But it was of course a complete non-starter for pair
| programming. After having tasted Visual Studio (+- Code) Live
| Sharing, there was simply no going back.
|
| Interesting that the straw that broke the camel's back for the
| author was pair programming. I've been pairing pretty regularly
| for a long time now, and everybody using their preferred
| editor/IDE was never a problem. Live editing the same code is
| something we played around with every now and then, but there
| wasn't real utility. One person sharing their screen is pretty
| much how I've done it for the last five years or so. If we want
| to switch who's driving, we just commit.
|
| Edit: In fact, my experience is that it has never been so _easy_
| for everyone to use different editors. CLI toolchains,
| editorconfig, auto formatters and linters, LSP, ...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I have a lot of experience pair programming and I definitely
| find that minimizing the friction to switch driver is a huge
| deal. Especially when knowledge-sharing or mentoring across
| experience divides, being able to take over for a few seconds
| but then fluidly hand control back just makes it not feel like
| a big deal for either person.
|
| In non-remote jobs I would always set up my station with two
| keyboards and two mice for this reason. Now that I work remote
| I always keep VS code configured for the codebase and use it
| for pairing. Even though my personal editor is, yes, emacs.
| broodbucket wrote:
| Emacs is still kicking on for me, though Helix is looking its
| biggest competitor. Not in the same league in terms of
| extensibility (Helix is deliberately non-extensible) but the out-
| of-the-box experience couldn't be more different.
|
| I just can't come at the combination of Electron, non-free
| components, and the owning company. Codium helps, but not enough
| adamc wrote:
| My experiences cover roughly the same period (early 2000s through
| August 2023), and then I switched to VSCode. I switched partly
| because I was sick of the kludge-y nature of Emacs -- yes, it
| could do anything, but there was a lot of tinkering to enable it.
| The problem with this stuff is that you never escape it -- 10
| years later, you are still replacing packages or tweaking
| packages, or finding new issues with a newer package... I got
| tired of it. Even though I liked Emacs Lisp OK, I came to feel it
| was a big productivity drain.
|
| But although I've used VSCode since (mostly for TypeScript
| development), I can't say that I like it. It is forever showing
| me things (pop-ups) I didn't ask to see, and it has problems
| working with WSL2 (it doesn't seem to notice filesystem changes
| correctly), etc. As usual, though, I am busy enough with real
| work that worrying about the ideal development environment has
| had to take a back seat.
|
| So it's possible I will eventually return to Emacs. More likely I
| will find some other tool. I'm tired of the Emacs way of doing
| things, even though I think the architecture of the editor was
| brilliant.
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