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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

I tried Emacs many times, but I still can't understand its appeal. Yes, everything can be changed, but there are layers and layers and layers of legacy code, cryptic keystrokes and shortcuts from 30 years ago, conflicting packages, elisp (I don't have anything against Lisp in general, but this particular dialect is quite quirky), etc etc.

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I was a heavy Vim user for about 4 years, and also did not understand Emacs though I tried it from time to time. The thing that changed my mind was using Org mode, and sticking with it for about two weeks. Once I felt comfortable in elisp and writing my own config, Emacs began to feel like a development environment that I had total control over. Everything that I bring from my life into Emacs -- task management, email, programming -- I now feel free to do them how I would like to do them. (Also, Org mode is great.)

edit: And there's nothing wrong with key bindings being 30 years old, Vim for instance has an incredibly efficient interface. Also, I find knowing basic emacs bindings quite useful around the OS X interface (many of them work).

And all that stuff will still be exactly the same, whichever language you're working in. It will also probably still be there in ten years' time - or, if not, it will have changed only quite slowly in the meantime.

(I know some people like to shake themselves up by doing the text editor equivalent of putting their shoes on the wrong feet, then once they get used to that, switching to walking on their hands to stop themselves from getting too comfortable - but I'm not one of them.)

Yet the amount of cruft is still not enough to make it irrelevant.

IDEs come and go. Emacs stays. It used to be mocked to be too large, today it's an average package, and tiny compared to other IDEs. It does a lot and let you extend it very freely (as of 2008, doing anything in Eclipse was a burden, can't speak of todays state though, I'll add that Emacs cruft has nothing to be ashamed of to the Eclipse Plugin and Workspace model, hundreds of (Object) list.get(arbitrary-index), TIMTOWDI.. )

People drool over features that were present in emacs for decades (flex match), and I've seen emacs absorb new ones (in-place evaluation of code with value preview for instance) faster than I would hope (a few years ago, a 2h sublime demo had literally nothing special).

It's syntax system felt (I never looked into it) superior to Eclipse (except for JDT) and VS.

Also Emacs users have a way of doing things. No mouse, often very lean. I'll rant about Eclipse again, but it really is bad. My hands hurts after one day (I morphed into an emacs alien maybe). Git integration is between unusable and useless (after 10y+ of work). etc etc

Plus energy is still flowing, look at Spacemacs, it's a lot less absurd than emacs, with a more stable plugin mechanism. People are still working on bringing guile elisp mode as the base vm.

Emacs have a lot of issues, and they don't matter.

I came to Emacs after learning my 5th IDE, and deciding I'd had enough of learning yet another set of cryptic keystrokes - if I was going to learn any more cryptic keystrokes, they'd be ones that would last for more than a few years. A minor benefit of learning the keystrokes is finding out they can apply elsewhere, like the shell readline, or in OSX.

try spacemacs!

http://spacemacs.org/

This makes Emacs great. It is a night and day difference. Multiple times I've tried to transition to Emacswithout it and just couldn't see why people love it. Spacemacs is a great default distribution and solves some major pain points of initial setup and "sane" defaults. There's still a couple things that I'm not quite hip with (installing new 'layers' without restarting, among a few others), but it's probably because I don't know enough about it yet.

As cool as spacemacs is, there are some pain points with it. Try following the documentation to add the mega theme pack. Insert the line that the docs say to insert. (into the file in which they tell you to insert it) Restart Emacs, find yourself stuck in pure emacs. Google how to exit emacs... or open a file and edit it. (If you have no experience with Emacs previously) Yes this is a doc issue, but the point is any misconfiguration, and you find yourself without any Vim-ishness at all.

This is what I see after I install Spacemacs on my Macbook:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/e6vhweatnrb98ow/spacemacs.png?dl=0

Are you _sure_ it is something usable? :)

Strange... Reach out to the maintainers, they act pretty quickly on issues.

On my MBP and the ones of my colleagues, plus my windows machines, spacemacs works great and without issues the last couple of months.

It even convinced 10y+ vim and IDE users to jump ship after testing it for a week.

From my own experience: developing in go, elixir, javascript + react ... It feels exceptionally great with the correct "layers" installed. And being a top notch crosslanguage IDE is just the tip of the iceberg of what spacemacs/emacs actually is capable of...

You are not alone. (I hope this knowledge soothes your pain)

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