Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I like Rust and terminal editors but the Readme really put me off, I advise the author to either remove the bit about the other editors or take the time to really study what people like in them, because there's a lot of nonsense in here.

The part about Vim is almost entirely missing the mark, but arguably so does the part about Emacs. The real brilliantness of Emacs is that almost everything is an Emacs buffer. The interface is extremely uniform: text file, configuration menu, completion buffer, compilation log, IRC chat window, it's all the same "widget" with just some customization (keybinds, coloring) on top. You can always copy/paste text the way you're used to, navigate the buffer the way you're used to, everything is uniform and consistent.

Ever felt the frustration of having an application pop-up a modal with an error message and you want to search for it online, only to realize that you can't select the text so you have to copy it by hand? That can't happen in Emacs. Ever been annoyed that your custom bindings and shortcuts didn't work in all the parts of your editor? That the way you interact in the main text editor is different from the input box in the search dialog? In Emacs it's all the same thing.

I switched to Vim a couple of years ago but this uniform interface is still something I miss. Maybe one day I'll bite the bullet and use Spacemacs.

Agreed about vim.

I'm no emacs guru, but I know this much: even if we suppose for the sake of argument that customizability is the best thing about emacs, it's an absolute pratfall to write

> Ox took the idea for the customization and extensibility of Emacs and made a configuration system where you can change the colours and appearance of the editor.

Have you checked out doom emacs? I used to have a manually tailored emacs configuration gradually built over the years, and ditched it quite happily in favour of doom emacs. I tried spacemacs to with much less success.

Doom emacs also has default vi-workflow.

Thank you (and jgilias) for the Doom emacs pointer, I'll be sure to look it up!

I switched from Spacemacs the last time Doom Emacs was discussed here and I'm very happy with it. Took me a while to adjust, and sometimes I'll miss something Spacemacs did, or struggle with muscle-memory, but overall it's been worth it. And the people on the Doom emacs discord helped out a bunch of times too.

I decided to bite the bullet and try Doom Emacs as a Vim user. I highly suggest it. I hadn't used Emacs before, so it was all new, but I really relate to what you're saying about the uniformness of all the 'apps', that was the first thing I noticed. And I get to keep my Vim muscle memory for wrangling text around, so to me it's the best of both worlds.

I totally agree with your statements about Emacs.

The readme mentions Emacs and says: "Ox took the idea for the customization and extensibility of Emacs and made a configuration system where you can change the colours and appearance of the editor."

Changing the colours and appearance is a customization option for every text editor.

Now if the readme mentioned that Ox had it's own version of a .emacs file that would run any Rust code you put into it on start up then I would be VERY excited.

You could try SpaceVim too: https://spacevim.org/

That would sort of be the worst of both worlds for me: my problem with Vim is that many of the fundamentals are a bit wonky. Elisp is vastly better than vimscript, the macro system of Vim in nice for one-off macros but quickly reaches its limit and becomes hard to manage if you try to use it to implement advanced functions etc... It's improved quite a lot these past few years (notably because of neovim and other forks) but Emacs has been dealing with that stuff since basically forever.

Basically I want Vim with an Emacs backend. I don't need a bajillion plugins, but I want the things that I use to be easily tweakable and customizable, something that Vim struggles with and Emacs excels at in my experience.

Honestly, as someone who transitioned from vim to emacs for Clojure development, I didn't find any great benefit to Doom or Spacemacs vs. reading some init.el files on github and setting up my own config. I find `use-package` to be the best package for managing and configuring the various plugins I have installed and was able to get running in an hour or so. If you're used to vim and have tried managing your own config in the past, it probably seems more daunting than it actually is.

But what's a marketing spiel without comparing to incumbents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com