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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

The default cursor movement commands probably predate emacs. Such that you are used to readline defaults. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24083753 is the first post I'm finding on that.

That said, I'm curious what the weight of emacs was on you? If it was that you were wanting to be in the other editor, than it makes sense that you should stay in the other editor. But this is no different than a lot of things. Is why some folks don't like changing the vehicle type that they use daily. Very little rational argument one way or the other. Such that, yes, you should use what makes you happy. Not only does it make you happy, but you are probably more effective because of that.

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> what the weight of emacs was on you

What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. I did start to looking into all the ways to customize it, but at that point, I couldn't really see much benefit over just using an IDE.

But that's just me.

Oddly, I haven't customized mine heavily. I'd assert that there really isn't a single "crowd" that are computer users. All the more true for stuff as customizable as emacs.

Even more amusing, I'm fairly certain I had more customization in vim before I decided I wanted to learn lisp. What ultimately killed my customization in all things, was I felt like I was customizing on top of a very shaky foundation. Emacs/vim are stable enough, of course. But building/packaging software is basically a giant playground.

Yeah I adore picking at my config to solve some small issue. Or implement a cool feature or customization.

I don't really use Emacs for the editor! It's more because it's a very configurable language runtime/vm with an editor interface.

And org-mode is great too.

I've been using Emacs for more than 30 years and my init file is mostly loading and configuring extra packages, and not customizing the editing behavior. I have no problem working in a basic "emacs -q" session (which skips loading the init file) when I don't want to "pollute" my main session (eg. working with huge logs/dumps).

This has gotten easier as the years go by, as well. Standard emacs has a lot of affordances that computers just couldn't do without bogging down the system years ago.

This is the way. While I do rebind plenty keys to enhanced or do-what-I-mean versions, I'm careful to avoid fundamentally change the meaning of any of the vanilla keys. So I see my config as more of a progressive enhancement over `emacs -q` or `mg` and I can still work with them just fine (if somewhat less comfortably).

Being able to work with `emacs -q` is also important to me for extending Emacs. It's easy to partially roll back a change if I break something in my config, and I can test out new elisp code against base Emacs.

"What I've noticed about emacs lovers is that they all customize it heavily - I didn't want to do that, since to me the point of using a plain text editor is that it's always available in exactly the same form wherever I happen to be. "

So you not customize vim either?

If you don't, you're missing out 99.999% of the greatness of both editors and doing yourself a huge disservice.

It's like being a carpenter and limiting yourself to only ever using a screwdriver.

> you not customize vim

No, and I have a specific reason - I ssh into remote boxes a lot, and I want the editor to work more or less the same wherever and whenever I use it. I guess I could customize vi to be a multi-purpose IDE but... that's what I have IntelliJ for.

If you're using vi or vim for really simple tasks, and not using it much, you're not missing out by not customizing it.

But the more you use it, the more you're missing out by just using vanilla vi or vim... and I hesitate to mention them in the same sentence because even vanilla vim is thousands of times more powerful than vi.

Vim's true power, however, lies in its customization and plugins. You're really missing out by restricting yourself this way.

That isn't a perfect reason to not customize your local editor. Most all allow opening remote files and shells. And simpler things like recently opened files can already be very convenient.

Simply put, IDE in the IDEA sense is not the only end goal. Such that that straw man is obnoxious.

Now, it is perfectly fine to just not want to. Such that I am not saying you should reconsider. Just don't be too proud of that reasoning.

I have all my emacs stuff in a git repo called .emacs.d. Wherever I am, I clone it into my home folder, and Emacs picks it up when I run it. Then it ends up looking the same as it always is.

"But what if you end up somewhere where you can't do this?" - well, when it happens, I guess I will figure something out! But I've had no problems so far, and I've been doing this a while.

    tmbp ~/.emacs.d % git log | tail -n 1
    Date:   Sat Feb 23 23:30:41 2008 +0000

(Before that I used svn, also with no problems.)

My config currently works with Windows, macOS and Linux, terminal or GUI, and with any Emacs from 26 to 29, and it behaves about the same in all cases. This didn't take much effort! - though each untested combination have a bad habit of requiring 5-10 minutes of fiddling about.

Emacs predates readline by 13 years

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