There is something fundamentally wrong with a UI/UX that takes a literal year to master. I can’t think of a better argument against learning emacs than the title of this submission.
They do a web search that quickly gives bad to poor advice.
Orgmode Magit Dired EXWM . . . this rabbit hole is an endless pursuit of higher and higher efficiency.
BTW, the UI/UX is quite customizable with basic elisp fu, using say Helm, Ivy etc.
I am really intriuged by this comment over there and also your recommendation:
jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it.
The linked article isn't very good, BTW. If you're interested in actually mastering emacs, the book "Mastering Emacs" [1], whose author comments here regularly, is the place to start.
The way this sentence is constructed, it makes VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs sound like just text editors :)
In all seriousness though, for the vast majority of programmers Emacs (or vim for that matter) has no value compared to, say, Jetbrains IDEs. You need dozens of plugins and an unknown number lines of arcane configurations just to have a semblance of a small part of functionality that those IDEs have out of the box.
Re "has no value" - wevs. It has massive value to me and to a community large enough to have continually supplied me with new and useful functionality and resources for 20 years, most of which have been spent using it alongside either Visual Studio (not "Code") or a JetBrains IDE (mostly Rider, some PyCharm). You use whatever tools you like and I'll decide what tools have value to me.
I say this because I think about a programming language's toolchain as the make-or-break aspect of its utility of a language. Can I interface with it well enough without anxiety or anger? :) But, these "lazily evaluated" tools I think form in an aggregate as a user interface to me.
Interesting how they claim it's compatible with vim was an advantage, oh well but aren't you trying to get me away from it? Sure it's a "shorter learning curve" (if they somehow get rid of all the emacsism before getting to that mode and learn nobody has a "meta" key in their computer)
I could learn a lot of more fulfilling things than emacs in a year. Guess I'll just stick with vim and vscode
You can learn basic navigation in about 5 to 10 minutes reading through emac's built in tutorial. Mastering it means finding a configuration that works for you, or writing your own implementation.
I don't use emacs regularly (other than as an info page browser), but I have been using vim for the last 20 years and am still learning new things about it.
I know that Emacs is a very powerful and completely open-source platform, but I have questions about its long-term viability. It's not commonly introduced in CS programs/bootcamps so it'll lead to a declining market share, and its most powerful capabilities require knowledge of LISP, which is not a popular language.
Time and energy spent learning Emacs is also non-transferable as it has a one-of-a kind shortcut/user interface. The student will be locked in to Emacs.
Students should invest time learning VSCode instead. At least it'll be easy to switch to other products.
What was the last version of Emacs you've used?
This is one of the most FUD-like posts I've read on this site in a long time.
I apologize if I got anything wrong. If you have any specific points about what I got wrong, for example, the average age of contributors or usage isn't related to the ecosystem. I am happy to change my mind.
The system-wide OS keyboard shortcuts for basic text editing in macOS are the same as emacs. I discovered this accidentally and people wonder why I can navigate basic stuff on the mac so well and my answer is "I used emacs for many years."
You have to use Control with it, of course. F by itself is... F.
if you swap caps lock with Control as most developers do, then it's a nice, simple, ergonomic addition.
> I’m using it for over 15 years now! And I’ve never ever even just heard about this.
Wow, that is embarrassing.
Edit: For example
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
Side note: emacs keybindings are less widespread on Linux, because you don't have such a component and GNU readline has a too strong license. So ironically emacs makes a strong case for using a proprietary OS.
I guess if someone knows emacs then maybe they’ll just try those key bindings and discover that they work. I never worked with emacs, but I would have learned the shortcuts had I known they existed.
It’s what I’m going to do now.
`man readline`
And being locked into Emacs isn't really an issue because it does everything. It's like saying you're locked into the dotnet ecosystem. I mean, so what?
And an important thing to note is that you may be locked into Emacs, but with every other tool you're locked out. What is there to learn about something like VSCode? You click on the marketplace and install extensions. Emacs might teach you things that aren't transferable (which I'd also question), but at least it's teaching you something.
Bootcamp a few years ago would have made me an expert in coding in Ruby/RoR under Atom with Ember.js; man, am I ready for those market shares!
Emacs has existed 40 years, do you assume it'll just go away?
For a recent example of adopting to trends, see the amount of time it took for lsp integration to 1) exist in external plugins and then 2) be put into emacs itself after lsp proved to be something that will likely stick around for a bit.
I guess people have been having them for the last 47 years now.
And I say this as an nvi/Unix tools user with TMUX because I have vi keys ingrained in muscle memory, but Emacs with Org Mode+calc+ELlSP+Texlive+Gnuplot is something out of this world.