Comment by mroll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mroll | Hacker News Reader

Emacs.

I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.

> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?

Emacs is the most essential piece of software in my workflow. It's probably not the worst, but it's the one where I see the most room for improvement. I lean heavily on org-mode for tracking what I'm working on, it's like my command center. I keep two emacs frames open at all times, one dedicated to org-mode.

Supported by an assortment of magical packages like helm, projectile and magit, I write code and anything else more efficiently than any other editor I've used. I was a vim user for ~5 years, and now use evil mode for modal editing in emacs.

So yeah, my opinion is that emacs is the best editor out there. But honestly it takes too much time to configure and maintain. I spend that time, because I don't feel like taking the productivity hit that I would by switching to another editor, but I wish I didn't have to.

I have a vision for a SaaS app that hosts my emacs config and provides me a nice graphical, discoverable interface for managing my configuration. It would have simple, intuitive flows for setting up the essential packages. Like maybe I could scroll through a list of the most popular packages (helm, projectile, hydra, magit, etc), and click to install.

The current state of the art in managing emacs config is googling the name of the package you are trying to configure, and trying to find someone's blog or github from which to copy/paste code from. There has to be a better way.

I think I’d say that the state of the art is reading the README, then the comments at the top of the source code for the package, then looking through the defvars. And, maybe that’s OK. I think Emacs should give up on the idea that it’s suitable for mass usage and embrace its identity as an editor for hackers who are at least slightly interested in lisp.

I don't think Emacs is suitable for mass usage. I think it's suitable for power users who are willing to invest time into learning to use a powerful tool. And I also think more people are becoming power users. With a well-crafted tool, you don't have to be a hacker to be a power user. I think the Superhuman email company is an interesting bet on this trend.

My guess is there are really good abstractions that can be built on top of elisp that let people configure emacs to be a powerful tool that fits their workflow like a glove, and doesn't require them to learn elisp or package internals.

Sounds like we agree.

> My guess is there are really good abstractions that can be built on top of elisp that let people configure emacs to be a powerful tool that fits their workflow like a glove

Yes, when think about this I get a bit hung up on the UI. Maybe those abstractions are going to have to ship a new one.

I think the only reason why I disagree with the comments here calling Git horrible and unintuitive is because Magit (Git interface for Emacs) makes it so easy to use and discoverable.

Any thoughts on https://www.spacemacs.org/ ?

It improves discoverability of hotkeys and packages for me.

Hah, yeah. I used spacemacs for 2 years from summer 2018 until about two weeks ago. And you're right! It does incredible things for discoverability with the built in hydra integration.

I switched to Doom Emacs about two weeks ago because it's built to be more performant and the configuration is meant to be a thinner layer.

Even with spacemacs layers, one has to go hunting on the googles and spend a bunch of time tweaking things if the layer doesn't set things up perfectly out of the box. And it rarely does.

Overall, I think spacemacs and doom emacs are amazing. Huge steps up from the base install. I just think there is a long way to go still.

I use Spacemacs. It's horrible. It's:

- Bloated

- Slow

- Encourages you to lock your personal configuration into the Spacemacs ecosystem, rather than writing it in generic Elisp so you can easily extract it (why I still use it).

- Introduces ridiculous abstractions that aren't necessary, just so they can put "spacemacs" in front of the variable name.

- Hasn't released to the master branch in 2 or 3 years (!)

- Consequenty breaks regularly when you use the rolling release (which you pretty much have to do)

- Has an unresponsive owner who doesn't want to hand the project off to someone else (or hasn't found someone)

- Sets up weird default behaviour that's very difficult to disable

- Has awful defaults for most languages anyway. Their Python layer is terrible, the features are extremely limited and it often doesn't work.

Doom is a much better starter pack.

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