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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

    For non-mainstream languages 95% of what Emacs enables can be done using
    multi-cursors and a macro language built in to the editor, and we're in
    2023. Those kinds of editors are a dime a dozen :-)

Are they? Multi-cursors, sure, but what other editors have a macro language that combines the power and accessbility of emacs lisp? The only other one that comes close is vim, and, as many critiques as I have of emacs lisp, I can firmly state: it's a lot nicer to use than vimscript.

But other than emacs and vim, which other editors allow me to interactively automate portions of my editing workflow? All the other IDEs and editors that you've cited, like IntelliJ or VSCode require you to either find or write a package. That's a much bigger step than just interactively evaluating some lisp to do a one-off thing.

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There are many text editors extensible in Lua or in Python. They generally don't allow messing with the innards as much (Firefox proved that's a double edge sword with its extension, it's not an unalloyed good).

https://micro-editor.github.io/index.html

https://lite-xl.com

https://neovim.io

https://code.visualstudio.com

http://www.sublimetext.com

And Emacs Lisp doesn't feel super accessible to most software developers under 40. Almost all its conventions come from a small little island, it's like marsupials in Australia, their own little parallel evolution.

> But other than emacs and vim, which other editors allow me to interactively automate portions of my editing workflow? All the other IDEs and editors that you've cited, like IntelliJ or VSCode require you to either find or write a package. That's a much bigger step than just interactively evaluating some lisp to do a one-off thing.

Devs generally write one-off or maybe reusable shell/Python/... scripts for that. But some of the examples I listed allow you to do a lot of that using Lua.

There are a ton of workflows out there, other devs don't just bang 2 rocks together because they can't automate everything <<inside>> the editor itself :-)

Also, xkcd is always very poignant:

https://xkcd.com/1205/

Software devs routinely fall into this trap:

https://xkcd.com/1319/

> And Emacs Lisp doesn't feel super accessible to most software developers under 40.

Or over 40 (I'm 42) :)

> Almost all its conventions come from a small little island, it's like marsupials in Australia, their own little parallel evolution.

This is a great analogy. And people forget that to program any system effeciently you need to know that system. Not necessarily inside-out, but good enough. A brief look at any emacs config will show you just how many weird and inconsistent things you have to contend with: major modes, minor modes, hooks, global variables, global functions, mode-specific global functions, special lists, non-special lists, and a myriad API calls and functions in between.

Wikipedia says that emacs has 10 000 (ten thousand) built-in commands [1] That's probably on par with JVM :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

The worst part for me is that I wanted a few "simple" UI tweaks with Emacs. I really wanted to use it.

But I wanted it to have a native tab bar and I wanted to move the command bar at the top, with dropdowns instead of "expand-ups" (turns out, I read right-to-left, top-down, not right-to-left, bottom-up. You can't have either of those, in the world's most extensible editor :-(

Emacs has had tab-bar-mode since 27.1 and tab-line-mode since 27.2. As for the drop-down minibuffer (I suspect that's what you mean by "command bar"), you can use something like vertico-posframe* and put it at the top like so:

  (setq vertico-posframe-poshandler #'posframe-poshandler-frame-top-center)

* https://github.com/tumashu/vertico-posframe

> but what other editors have a macro language that combines the power and accessbility of emacs lisp?

Is it accessible? Why would I want to spend time learning the idiosyncrasies of a 40-year-old editor to write something that I might use once in a blue moon?

I have other, more interesting things in life.

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