There are absolutely areas that others do better, but the self-documenting “living program” nature is too much to give up; everything you ever need to know or do is a few keystrokes away.
I like it obviously otherwise I wouldn’t still be using it, but it will never exactly feel elegant to me. More like a good text editor and a hundred other tools all duct taped together.
That's ironic.
In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer) handles/styles headings. Its crazy!
One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things work together. I have orderless installed for matching strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in VSCode you cant even get close to that.
VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to „build your text editor“ cause thats what emacs basically is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to fit your exact needs with almost no limitations
However, I draw the line at "text editor" with Emacs. I have no desire to read my email, paint pictures, or compose music inside Emacs—there are better tools for that.
A few years ago I got fed up with not being able to configure Mail.app to notify me of responses to "watched" threads but nothing else and thought "...I bet the CLI tools would make this achievable."
So, I moved to mbsync for fetching email, not much for indexing the local email directory, and notmuch-mode / Emacs for reading and writing email.
It's head and shoulders above any other email setup I've ever used.
I wish I'd done it years ago.
and that's the fascinating thing about it. What the OP called a 'living program' Smalltalk people called 'human-computer symbiosis'. Software as a fully transparent, introspective, organic thing you can directly interact with and change even as it runs.
There's actually very few software like it, and if anything philosophically more and more software tends towards the static unix "one tool one job" mantra.
In fact, my config these days is basically vanilla emacs with some of the UI stripped away, the modus theme, and a few language-specific modes for syntax highlighting. I don't use evil or hydra or any such thing any more. The only thing I have a sticking point with is exec-path-from-shell messing with $PATH in my env because of how it works.
I guess the reason it works well for me is because I try not to write code, so I don't need a massive toolkit that helps me write code as efficiently as possible. No-code is bug-free code, maximise the work not done, etc.
At the end of the day, it was a very nice text editor with a development environment embedded in it and the ability to tweak things to my work flows was certainly interesting. However, I never enjoyed the seemingly unintuitive default key bindings and I often found myself disappearing into rabbit holes and tweaking stuff just to make everything work more smoothly. Ultimately, I decided that was time I should have been spending on more productive pursuits.
To this day though, I don't regret giving emacs a spin and I still swap caps lock and ctrl on all my systems. Remapping that key binding is helpful for so many things outside of emacs.
Some examples are all the ivy autocompletion, command autocompletion, dired, adjust-parens, windmove, smart parents, expand and contract region, agressive-indent, avy, swiper, hydra, and so on.
And it seems whatever I think about exists. Every time I go: How do I? There's a solution, and if not, I can just quickly add a function for it myself.
That's what keeps me in Emacs. Some other editors are more polished, and have better UX, might be more responsive, but there's always something they don't have and I miss from Emacs, or something that I don't like how they do it and I can't customize to my liking.
When I first started, I found the keybindings odd, but now I love them since the core set of shortcuts—C-a, C-e, C-f, etc.—work "everywhere" from the terminal, to GNU readline-based programs, to even native macOS text boxes. If you don't like the default keybindings, you can change them or use the Evil package [0] for Vim bindings.
If you want to get up and running quickly, I'd check out Doom Emacs [1] which is easier to configure and takes care of a lot of configuration for you. I personally use a reasonably-minimal config I wrote myself [2]. If you like to tinker, I'd recommend writing your own config, as it will also teach you a lot about Emacs.
If you have any questions feel free to reach out—contact info in my profile.
[0] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil [1] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs [2] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/.emacs.d/blob/master/init.el
It's totally fine to use IDEs if they make your life easier. In my last C++ job, I would edit code with Emacs, but keep Visual Studio open for the IDE conveniences.
Whether Emacs is an IDE or not depends how you define IDE. I use Eglot [0] for LSP integration; this gives me IDE-like features like "jump-to-definition", syntax error highlights, warnings, etc. and integrates with company-mode [1] for code completion. This handles most of my needs for writing code.
As for other things like a file tree, I've found that the built in `project-find-file` command combined with `vertico` [2] and `orderless` [3] makes finding files and navigating around projects easier; that pair behaves similarly to CMD+P in Sublime Text or VS Code. There are file tree packages out there, but I've found that I don't really need a file tree in practice and that I prefer navigating around projects with fuzzy file search and grep.
[0] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot [1] https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode [2] https://github.com/minad/vertico [3] https://github.com/oantolin/orderless
I never found a side panel of any use (many are available), but I use projectile for quick jump to file all the time.
My python setup is less refined than C++ (I haven't bothered yet to enable LSP), but I use elpy which is works fine for lisp-style programming with a persistent REPL.
The truth is, I think that I've outgrown SpaceMacs and ready to try vanilla Emacs with Evil sometime. But SpaceMacs was definitely the gateway to getting me into org-mode, and that really is revolution in being able to organize my life.
Just bare emacs is a great editor. You only need a few commands, and then can incrementally learn more as you go. Often, when you learn some new command or new package you'll wonder "how did I manage to use emacs for all this time without knowing this?" But the answer is: you were able to get a lot done with what you already knew.
I've been using Emacs for over 40 years and have a very short init file with only a small amount of customization. And I still learn a new command or package every couple of weeks.
I recommend start with video tutorials:
1. Mike Zamansky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49kBWM3RQQ8&list=PL9KxKa8NpF...
2. Rainer König org-mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQS06Qjnkcc&list=PLVtKhBrRV_...
It boils down to using the already known vim keys for basic actions like splitting the window, save a file etc. and creating keybinds for anything else I needed. So I customized any keybind to my liking, I didn't really adopt the emacs binds since I find many of them to be quite unintuitive.
It took me like 2-3 weeks of constant configuration to get to a productive config that covers all my needs (from autocompletion, to colorscheme) and I still edit my config every 1-2 days since I discover new small "itches" and then fix those.
For example: I always want my compilation output to be on one monitor -> always open the compilation buffer ("output") in its own window. Perfect!
To me emacs is like a platform that I can use to build my "own" perfect text editor that does exactly what I want it to do without really any compromises. This is where emacs shines, the endless possibilities and nothing that holds you back and says "no the editor is not meant to do X".
Ability to extend your system with a quick `eval` and adjust keybindings when needed is a very hard drug to me. And I'm not in the fanatic period anymore but still.
The initial Emacs setup is very basic and quite ugly, but good for learning. Follow the built-in tutorial.
After learning the basics, create an init.el file, learn to use the use-package package, and start off trying out interesting packages to make your life better. I would suggest finding a good theme and giving helm a go to begin with.
(and I don't like modal editors :-) )
Emacs has a text editor too ?!!?