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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

I think the germane point about Emacs here is that some people like writing Lisp and some people hate it. If you hate it Emacs is likely not going to be your best environment, and that’s fine.

I really like writing Lisp so Emacs has a simple way of doing anything I want, but it’s not for everyone.

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I love writing Lisp and do it for a living, but I can’t even remember the last time I had to write a single line of elisp to use Emacs (unless you count things like adding or removing a layer in my .spacemacs file as writing Lisp).

Really? Emacs is the opposite for me, I've used it for 15 years and really only recommend it to those for whom writing a little bit of emacs lisp sounds like fun. You write lisp for a living, sounds like in Emacs, so I assume you use paredit-mode. Don't you have to do little things like ensure that paredit-mode is turned on in your mode hook for clojure or common lisp or whatever?

I have changed the values of dotspacemacs-smartparens-strict-mode and dotspacemacs-smart-closing-parenthesis from the default nil to t in my .spacemacs file. As far as I can remember, that's the only paredit-ish customisations I have done. And by the way, I use smartparens everywhere, not just in Lisp modes.

Generally, the Spacemacs defaults work really well for me, and for many others. Elisp hacking was more relevant in the past. These days, with Spacemacs and other similar community efforts that deliver sane and well thought out settings, not much tinkering is required.

OK, I feel like I'm missing something with smartparens. I do the same as you -- but I use paredit everywhere, not just in lisp modes. When I've tried smartparens it seemed much less attractive (powerful?) than paredit.

I think this is a larger problem with Emacs. Duplicating a line is something that should be easy to do out of the box.

And if it's a situation where you really need to make the user define a keyboard shortcut, don't make them do C-c followed by the actual shortcut, let them define single keystroke shortcuts to do what they want. Multiple keystroke shortcuts are so damn annoying.

https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil ;)

I have that on my list.

Why? I can't think of any time when I've wanted to duplicate a line.

Well, there are a lot of things I don't want to do, but that doesn't mean others don't want to do them. As these things go, it's a fairly common operation.

I don't hate or like lisp. It's just another programming language which does the job.

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