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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

I'm not him, but I have the same opinion.

Emacs doesn't play super well with others. You can do a lot of things in emacs, but you can't do emacs in other things.

On the occasions that I'm writing Java, I find IntelliJ to be super awesome. But I get annoyed because the editor in IntelliJ is not emacs. I'd like to be able to do things I can do in emacs in IntelliJ. Realistically, that means replacing the IntelliJ editor with emacs, but at the moment that isn't really possible.

Some things you can use emacs for, like editing web forms (I used to do that with an extension in Firefox), but emacs is really not so great at being used in other programs.

As far as emacs itself, the somewhat crappy GUI rendering precludes creating an IntelliJ like experience.

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I can't help but feel this is a shortcoming of some of the other apps you are naming. In particular, if they played well with $EDITOR then this wouldn't be an issue.

Instead, everyone almost always finds their own way of rendering the text editor portion of what they are doing. Consider, your concern could just as easily be shifted to complaining about IntelliJ. Why can't I easily call out to it to get the information it knows?

That’s why language servers are in vogue.

And to be fair, if you view UNIX as the IDE, it fits with the idea of small programs working well together. GLOBAL actually gets pretty friggin close to perfect for code exploration in most languages. I haven't tried the latest completions modes. Mainly because I just haven't bothered setting it up. It is borderline terrifying to me to see how reliant on ridiculously powerful and integrated IDEs some folks have become.

IntelliJ's GUI is 65535x better than Emacs's GUI. I'd rather have Emacs as the editor in IntelliJ than Emacs trying to deal with whatever information IntelliJ is providing.

Doesn't change my assertion, though. If we want to hold up Emacs as being more embedable and playing more nicely with other programs, that same bar can be set for the other programs.

And this is largely up to each person. I personally loathe the IDEA GUI. And most any GUI. I will grant that they do better screenshots, but I will take what is effectively a super powerful terminal buffer any day.

The bar could be set for other programs, sure. But the question was only about why we use emacs and hate emacs.

It doesn't change your point at all, but I simply have a different opinion and was asked about it. I don't really care about embedding intellij, I just want to use emacs in other things.

Ah, completely fair. I was intending to offer a complimentary point, not necessarily to change your mind on this.

I do feel it is a rather personal choice. As I said, I don't care for the IDEA GUI, but I understand others do.

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