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Comment by lkfsfldkjfslk | Hacker News Reader

I think people who stick with it tend to be people who see it as a hobby. If you're just looking to get stuff done VS Code or JetBrains will get you up and running way faster than Emacs, with similar productivity. I stick with Emacs because it's so configurable it can be exactly the way I want it, which I haven't found in other editors.

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Another perspective: those who stick with it view their tools as a long term investment. I have noticed that those who drift from editor to editor tend to use a subset of their features for a subset of their work. Only a handful will become proficient in its use and use it for a broad range of applications.

In a professional context I'm known for telling people "we don't care what editor you use, but it's where you're going to spend most of your working career, so there's a lot of payoff to picking one and obsessing over it." (Of course, I also recommend people learn to touch type...)

Sure Emacs is endlessly configurable. But it is too clunky for my taste.

I realize this is sort of like complaining about trivial code style preferences in a code review, rather than looking at what the code at hand is actually doing.

But Emacs just feels too... Old-school. Not in a cool way, but rather in a boring way.

I wish I "figured out" Emacs though.

Growing up with Windows GUI, I too found many concepts in Emacs are just too different and "old-school".

I wonder if there is an opportunity for a modern, open-source, extendable, programmable text editing environment that uses CUA, Tabs instead of Buffers, and Javascript instead of LISP. Or if it's already too late because VS Code has already taken over the modern, open-source, and extendable parts already?

VS code is corporate embrace and extend open source. Note how they intentionally cripple the truly free builds. That said, VS Code has done great good too. The LSP is a wonderful step forward for all editors.

Edit: incidentally I think there’s a GNU Emacs fork that has some kind of JavaScript binding.

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