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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

All of these are missing the point imo. The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins and functionalities. Everything is a menu away, and fuzzy searching makes it easy to find out commands and learn their shortcuts. This whole process just doesn’t exist in emacs. To get a plugin, it’s a huge step (setting up custom elisp to get melpa) and then it’s a huge learning curve just to try a plugin.

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> The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins

I don't think think pasting a few lines[1] into a file can be counted as a huge step? There's built-in UI [2] for installing and configuring packages.

To me the overwhelming advantage of an IDE is good semantic language support out-of-the box. Even having invested quite some time in language-support configuration in emacs I usually use an IDE instead.

> and fuzzy searching makes it easy to find out commands and learn their shortcuts.

This is a package (extension) away in emacs, and there's multiple starter configs which have this out of the box (spacemacs, doom, etc.). IIRC the vanilla experience have prefix completion of commands.

Emacs suffer a bit from having an enormous number of commands which kinda pollute the command-palette-search for everyday use.

Some of the quirky terminology takes some time to get used to (eg.: "open" -> "find")

Overall I find emacs discoverability to be very good and the documentation is comprehensive and well-written.

[1] https://melpa.org/#/getting-started (besides, the elpa repository is available out-of-the box)

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Pa... (admitting you often have to use some elisp for more advanced configuration)

Pasting in a few lines is a HUGE step, because how are beginning Emacs users supposed to even know they are supposed to do that?

I see this every year with new undergraduates at uni -- they are often aware of vim, Emacs, VSCode and eclipse, and play around with them. They don't have any reason to believe Emacs and vim are good, and any step to get stuck at loses you a bunch of users.

Some students take up vim, but Emacs gets almost no use, as it doesn't (to the beginner user) seem to do anything well, and everything is hard to do.

For example, I'm trying to setup rust-analyzer with emacs right now, and the instructions here makes 0 sense at all: https://rust-analyzer.github.io/manual.html#emacs

I'm completely stuck at step 2 and 3, how can anyone parse this without being an emacs pro is beyond me

I don't really get what you mean. Sure, setting up MELPA is a bit annoying, but after that trying a new package is trivial. You go to the package list and install the package, then you trigger whatever command you need.

I agree that fuzzy search is a great thing though, and I think something similar to Ivy should be included by default.

> then you trigger whatever command you need

how do you do see? How do you get to the list of commands? How do you search for a command? How do you remember a shortcut if you run a command manually?

I've been using emacs for quite some time and I still get stuck there.

To run/search-for a command: M-x

If you have installed and configured helm (I assume the same for ivy) you'll get a list and the search will be fuzzy)

In helm: shortcuts are shown in the result list:

    M-x replac|
    replace-string
    replace-regexp
    query-replace (M-%)
    ...

In helm you can navigate the list with the arrow keys and TAB (not sure if it's the default key) will pop up an help buffer for the command

I don't use helm, tried for a while but got really confused by a lot of things. So when I do M-x I actually can't fuzzy search OR see what the shortcut version of a command is.

I've used Emacs for around 14 years now, I rarely touch my configuration. There's lines in my config today, that I haven't changed since I first learned to use Emacs and set it up (e.g. keybindings, tab-width, etc.).

I like that kind of stability, makes it possible to move my focus away from the editor, towards the problems I'm trying to solve.

Not a downside necessarily, but I can imagine that life would get very stressful if you're ever to lose your custom configuration for emacs.

It’s in a public git repository

And that's why you keep it in version control and mirror it to, say, Gitlab and Github.

Could burn an archive to an archival-quality DVD, too.

I suspect I'm more likely to die spontaneously than have all of those and my local machine fail spontaneously.

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