282 hours of configuration! If we subtract the weekends from that 916 days, that's an average of about 45 mins a day fiddling with config.
I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
I don't even want to spend 45 mins a month fiddling with config. I really don't understand Emacs people.
Some people like to customize their environment to their exact specifications. Others will use whatever is available and never change it.
That is not required. Although default Emacs is pretty barebones (from a modern interface standpoint, not features) one can get a pretty good kickstart by using something like Spacemacs or Doom emacs and only sprinkling a bit of configuration here and there.
I too had a pile of config accrued over years - mostly porting features from other editors to Emacs. After adding Doom, I have just a few lines, it does all the rest.
The point is - usually on other editors you need to either wait for someone to create a "plugin" to do what you need, or you need to create a full blown plugin yourself, which is not a small task. In Emacs, it's extremely easy to create functions that will do tasks for you. And that gets addictive.
That is what I thought when was motivating myself to continue diving into vim and emacs. In the end it turned out that the this this problem of "difficult extensibility" exists only in my head but not in VSCode or IntelliJ IDEA. Eventually, you can do magic on your files with sed/python/any other language in terminal and this most likely is better solution because it is editor-agnostic and good for automation.
It's 0.43 hours a day, which is 26 minutes, not 45. (Hint: 0.5 hours is 30 minutes.)
Emacs is essentially an IDE for developing emacs.
(while (not (eobp))
(while (not (markdown-table-at-point-p))
(forward-char 1))
(markdown-table-align)
(goto-char (markdown-table-end)))
The problem is in the terminology: Config
Replace the word with programming and it will all make sense. People who write Javascript code to build custom tools for their own use are doing the exact same thing as Emacs users tweaking their config.
These days when I have time I'm writing elisp to make it easier for me to write math notes. One org roam node per concept/definition/proof. However, I'm building a graph: If a definition of a math object involves prior knowledge, I want to link to those nodes. The default org roam interface makes this a pain, so I want an interface that prompts me for the title, and lets me select dependencies one by one. It then inserts the node, with links to all those dependencies.
Where does all this code go?
In my config.
When we need to quickly debug or carry out a complex operation at work? People gather around my machine. Once you're set up with things like org-mode, magit, lsp your productivity goes up a lot.
That being said, I'm also one of those people that break my Emacs config often, and I have a different version on each PC I use.
Not every user is like this though! Many try to keep their setup as stable as possible.