Emacs is violent passion
12 points by confusedalex
12 points by confusedalex
I find it deeply ironic that after the whole tirade about “the way I want to do it might not be quite like how you want to do it and you shouldn’t make assumptions”, the author goes into a second tirade about how people who use VSCode and extensions and whatever else are doing it wrong and even has the audacity to assert that these people “won’t be around for long” in this industry. It’s arrogant, patronizing, and a terrible sales pitch for an otherwise incredible piece of software.
This whole article comes down as a desperate attempt at coming off superior just because the author uses one tool instead of another.
It’s a poisonous attitude.
What tools you use to write code doesn’t really matter as long as you understand the tools you use, the code you’re writing, and you’re productive overall.
For some people their preference is going to be vi/emacs/neovim. For some people that’s going to be a full on IDE like PyCharm or Visual Studio. For some people that’s going to be a leaner editor like VS Code.
None of these choices are wrong, nor do they define or correlate with what level of ability you have.
Yes and no. The tone carries over to the car analogy and I don’t think this guy is saying he’s a rally driver or drives a rally car daily.
Secondly, VSCode is just OK, and I’ve seen good programmers I respect fail to learn pretty much any of its features. For a lot of users it’s already more editor than they care to learn.
If, after ten years of programming, you still absolutely need menus to click on and save your latest work of art and labels on your keyboard to tell you what each button does, you got bigger issues than syntax highlighting.
Yeah my memory isn’t the greatest.
such a friendly and helpful community,
Sure is. /s
Posts like this make me want to use anything else than emacs.
I’ll happily keep using the subpar editors. And having cat in my terminal sounds fun, though I prefer reptiles.
my fingers hurt when I use emacs, this is the only reason I am not using it, it might be the best editor/software in other aspects
I haven’t used Emacs’ default keybindings in a decade. Instead evil-mode, “the extensible vi layer” has served me well.
this is a standard reply I get when I mention my issues with emacs and I not I have no excuse on giving it another shot!
To be fair, many resources out there will only talk about the default keybindings, so learning is probably a bit harder.
Do not hesitate to look at Spacemacs or Doom Emacs. They might help you start by having many things pre-configured. That’s what I did when I switched to evil and I am still happy with Doom Emacs.
How? Someone new to Emacs might not know enough to know you can change the horrible key bindings. Or now they have to learn Elisp to change things when all they wanted to do was learn Python. Oh, and vi bindings? vi isn’t all that easy to learn (as I have in my quote file: “everyone’s first vi session.^C^C^X^X^X^XquitqQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;:xwhat”). I have all these nice editing style keys like arrows, and PageUp, PageDown, Home, End, Insert, Delete … why do none of them work? (at least, that was the case when I first tried vi and Emacs decades ago).
At least the editor I do us, joe, always displays the keystroke needed to get help on the screen.
Oh, and vi bindings? vi isn’t all that easy to learn
Sure! I didn’t say they were easy to learn. As for not knowing enough, I did touch on that in my second comment.
I must applaud your very realistic impression of a soldier during the Great Editors Wars though ;-)
Is it just me or would anyone else also like an Emacs distro – something like Doom Emacs – that focused on building in ErgoEmacs and support for local keyboard layouts and things, just to make it look and feel more like a standard post-1990s text editor?
I would love this. The only flavour of Emacs I’ve ever been able to use out of the metaphorical box was Aquamacs and sadly development has gone dormant.
What’s your experience of emacs-plus been?
Nothing. I’ve never heard of it before. But I do not see any mention there of integrating ErgoEmacs or redefining the UI. Unless I’m missing something, it looks like vanilla Emacs but more up-to-date and available by Homebrew.
The point of my post was that, to me, vanilla Emacs is unusable. ErgoEmacs tames it and makes it (and some of the docs and the tutorial) at least a little bit sensible, but you need to know your way around Emacs and its various config files to be able to install ErgoEmacs in the first place.
That’s why I am asking if there would be any interest in a distro with it preinstalled.
I’ve defined some keyboard shortcuts for some of the most useful (for me!) commands out of those 8000.
My favorite is C-x j bound to 'bury-buffer
Does anyone else love bury-buffer?
I added C-SPC C-k to doom/kill-this-buffer-in-all-windows. Convenience macros like these is why I’m staying with doom, even though I’ve heavily stripped a lot of default packages and config from it.