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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse.

Org mode is the one thing that keeps me interested in emacs, but every time I try to get into it I get hit by emacs anachronisms.

I’ve not used this tool or Roam, but are there modern org-mode front ends?

Aquamacs is a macOS-flavored emacs distro, but it still intentionally feels like emacs. I’d really like an “org-mode-only” app that feels modern and lets me forget I’m using emacs under the covers.

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> Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch

Is that true? I know that popular editors have tons of extensions available (with VSCode leading the pack), but is any other editor as programmable and user-tweakable as Emacs? I think Atom was an attempt in that spirit, but its momentum was completely killed by VSCode.

As an example, which other app will let you link to emails, or specific locations in code, in your organizational tool?

I feel that Emacs puts the user in the driver's seat in a way that almost no other piece of modern software even comes close. The only comparable, in my mind, is the *nix/GNU ecosystem, and that's about as ancient as Emacs.

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PS: One more option that hasn't been mentioned yet is Neorg (Org+Neovim). Was on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27802153

Actually, I forgot to pay homage to LightTable. It had a fantastic vision, a compelling initial demo, and showed it was possible to radically innovate in the editor landscape. IIUC, it played a role in inspiring Atom.

Pity things turned out the way they did. I sometimes feel that if the project had stuck it out for a decade with a slightly less ambitious goal, it could have really moved the computing experience forward — even if only for developers / power users.

> Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch

Citation needed, my Emacs talks to the same LSP daemon that my coworkers' VSCode instances talk to, and Emacs has a lot of text editing features VSCode doesn't

Plus VSCode is just uglier, and is Microsoft and is it even GPLv3?

Maybe I'm becoming irrelevant and I'm going to find myself without a job soon

I'm all for Emacs, but calling it prettier than VSCode is a bit of a stretch :D

Of course aesthetic taste is quite subjective, but I think a lot of people will agree that most modern software (including VSCode) looks much slicker than Emacs (excluding extensively customized outliers).

As for my personal taste, Atom is by far the visually most appealing editor I've seen. I don't know enough graphic design to articulate the difference, but I wonder why the look & feel is not replicated more widely.

> excluding extensively customized outliers

I might be wrong here but extensive customization is hallmark of Emacs.

I would find it very odd if someone wouldn’t customize its presentation to The Exact Way They Like.

Emacs is a text-based editor so it cannot be customized as much as a browser can.

Emacs is a Lisp machine. Even Firefox during its XUL heyday was not as customizeable as Emacs is. Nowadays, with browsers using WebExtensions, browsers are laughably inflexible by comparison.

Here are a few topics for you to consider:

* Function advice (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ad...)

* Generalized variables and the cl-letf macro (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/cl/Modif...)

* Hooks

* Lisp macros in general

* Special variables and dynamic binding (note that Emacs Lisp has supported lexical binding for years; some still don't know this)

* Buffer-local variables

* Live evaluation of Lisp code, including redefining functions and variables, vs. building and loading an extension in a browser

Or maybe you were just joking, in which case, you got me good!

Not joking. Emacs can't even do wysiwyg word processing, let alone the kind of interactive environments that browsers support.

Chromium/Electron is a Javascript machine, with graphical debugger; network monitoring; the world's largest package ecosystem; tab-local variables [1], built-in support for peripherals via webUSB, obviously live evaluation of js, 3D webgl, ...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/sess...

It feels like you haven't gotten deep enough into Lisp and Emacs. Emacs is quite the epitome of malleable software systems. There isn't a single software product as flexible and configurable by design.

Just because it is currently doesn't have a graphical layer or cannot run a browser engine within (which is just a matter of time), that doesn't make it less flexible.

That's just stating the claim again, not providing evidence. How many browser extensions have I written? How many emacs extensions? Fwiw I did everything in Emacs for many years.

Regardless of the differences in the core platform, the ecosystem is where the real power is. The number of full-time paid contributors to Chromium/Electron/VSCode is dramatic, and it shows. The reach of the VSCode ecosystem means there are now competitive ports of Magit and other key packages.

Maybe the Emacs system has a little more power than a browser. VSCode disallows extensions from messing with the DOM to ensure stability; Emacs doesn't, which means less stability and more flexibility. But it's not much use in practice, or I haven't seen the use.

Anyway, Javascript and Elisp are both basically low-end lisps, largely written in C/C++, and running on x86 machines. Neither resembles the theoretical Symbolics machines of yore.

Maybe with billions in funding Emacs could start competing with the Chromium/Electron/VSCode teams. But that's not gonna happen. I can't afford to write my whole environment alone, so I go where the people are.

> Maybe with billions in funding Emacs could start competing with the Chromium/Electron/VSCode teams. But that's not gonna happen

We've seen that many times. With proprietary and free editors and IDEs. Eclipse, Delphi, NetBeans, Sublime, Atom, XCode, MonoDevelop, InteliJ, Visual Studio, VSCode, etc.

Many times in history there were "Emacs and Vim killers", and yet after over 45 years, Emacs is still here and Vim keeps improving. I can bet that 20 years from now and without billions spent on funding, Emacs still would do some things better than any of existing IDEs.

What I like about emacs, from an aesthetic perspective, is that I can turn off everything except the buffers and the minibuffer, and quickly tile the views I need.

VSCode's licensing is a travesty. Nobody at a company with any serious IP should be using it anywhere.

> I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse.

If I'm writing Java I'll definitely use a JVM hosted IDE like Eclipse, but other than that I'm just not seeing this. For example, I recently decided to try VSCode for a popular scripting language and if anything configuring it to work properly was actually more difficult than getting lsp-mode and few helper packages working in GNU Emacs.

Spacemacs[1] is another popular "modern" Emacs distribution that you may be interested in.

[1] https://www.spacemacs.org/

Logseq might fit the bill: https://logseq.com/ I've been using it for a few weeks now after switching over from Roam and it's been great. Everything is plaintext (I use it in markdown mode, but they support org-mode).

I wrote a blog post about integrating org-roam with logseq [1]. Unfortunately this doesn’t work with the the new V2 org-roam update, so I am sticking with V1 for now.

[1] https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere...

Such a tool would inevitably fall behind in what it supports and would lack as well useful integration. It would lack depth and breadth.

If prior to 2020 it would have lacked roam support. If prior to this month it would lack roam v2. Then again its useful that org links can link to everything from a page in a document to an email which isn't possible if disconnected from the rest of the emacs ecosystem.

What does it even mean for something to be "modern"?

I started from bare emacs configuration and can safely say I almost never touch a line of lisp now that I've switched to Doom emacs. I just uncomment some packages I want (like magit, org-roam, etc.) and it runs off and configures the packages in a non-conflicting manner ready for production.

That's not saying banging on lisp to get your emacs into that perfect state isn't fun, just that now that I'm a capitalist worker I don't really have the time for it any more. Highly recommended.

I’d second Doom emacs, I consider it the best way to use Vim :D

However, I am using it less and less, and I find myself using VSCode more and more. I now very rarely find myself using Doom emacs or vim. I’d say for small changes I still use them, but any time I think I’m going to be doing a significant amount of work in a directory or file, I always open it in VSCode. Not sure when that change happened, honestly.

Look for Obsidian[0]. It's very similar, but operates on it's own Markdown flavour (with imports for Rome and Zettelkasten), that allows you to create pretty elaborate networks of info.

[0] https://obsidian.md/

"Prelude is an Emacs distribution that aims to enhance the default Emacs experience"

https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/

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