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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

So happy to see my favorite IDE for the last 30 years being actively developed and maintained. Multiple IDEs have come and gone over those 30 years, and I waved to them on their way as they arrived and then as they passed away into nothingness.

Every time a new IDE arrived, crowds cheered, and it was all the rage and fashion, while my Emacs was called "obsolete", "hard to use", "bizarre", and other things. I spent some time over those 30 years looking at new IDEs, trying them out, configuring them, and each and every time this was time wasted, because the IDE was discontinued, abandoned, or otherwise became useless.

If I could tell something to my younger self, it would be: keep faith in solutions that are open and have been around for a while, you will save a lot of time over the years.

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Same here. It's the oldest continuously used piece of software for me. I tried it first on a Sun Unix workstation at the university around the late 90s. I've tried komodo, vscode, sublime, vi and many others and still use emacs. The funny thing I don't even know that many key combinations and use only a few customizations.

I was pleasantly surprised when I was issued a mac at work that most of the basic editing commands on macos text widgets support emacs key bindings (ctrl+a/e/k/p/n).

Those keybindings are one of the very few features of macOS I missed after going back to GNU/Linux. It's such a nice thought, especially with macOS using the command key for most, uh, commands - it doesn't impose any burden on non-emacs-users, but for those who are used to those keybindings, it's bliss.

GTK used to support a similar thing up to version 2? One needed to enable it with:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"

Sadly, I think support was removed. Part of the problem was that this and other themes were in conflict with preset bindings, e.g C-p for a print dialog.

Yeah, on macOS it works well, because the Ctrl-based shortcuts don't get in the way of the regular keybindings.

It wasn't removed. These days, the setting is still exposed in GNOME Tweaks.

Those are 'readline' keybindings actually, and available in many term, shells, repls... Sometimes, just a config away. See: https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keyboard-shortcuts-ev...

> Emacs was called "obsolete", "hard to use", "bizarre", and other things.

Well, Emacs isn't designed for a common user, but for a power user. From my experience, first time using Emacs was really frustrated.

In contrary, VSCode, Atom, Sublime Text etc. were usable right from the start. But these IDEs didn't stick for me. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Emacs and Vim, although took a lot of effort to configure them into usable text editors/IDEs, stick with me 'til these days and I'm continuing to use them in the future. The power of configurations are astounding and I can shape them into whatever I want.

> Well, Emacs isn't designed for a common user, but for a power user. From my experience, first time using Emacs was really frustrated.

That's not different from a piano. Musical instruments are not designed for "common users" or "beginners". The ones that are, are not good for playing good music.

>Emacs was called "obsolete", "hard to use", "bizarre", and other things.

As a daily emacs user, it is all those things. It's just also awesome if you put in the time to get over the hump and learn it.

The "out of box" experience for emacs is really, really bad.

> The "out of box" experience for emacs is really, really bad.

That's not much different from a piano :-). Musical instruments are not designed for "common users" or "beginners". The ones that are, are not good for playing good music.

I'm also very happy with Emacs' continued existence. Frankly, I don't know what I'd do without M-x shell plus related hacks, but I think I'd have to reinvent the concept of having arbitrary numbers of named shells with infinite output/input streams attached to them, with searchable histories, etc. Just like the unix concept that everything is a file was super powerful, so is the Emacs concept that everything is text. And of course lisp helps smooth things out whenever there are rough edges.

The lindy effect applies to lots of things in life

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

> I spent some time over those 30 years looking at new IDEs, trying them out, configuring them, and each and every time this was time wasted, because the IDE was discontinued, abandoned, or otherwise became useless.

"wasted" sounds a bit too hard to me. If you learn and use some tool productively for some years, even if this stops, the years were not wasted. Ephemeral things can also have value.

No an eMacs user myself, but do you ever imagine a time when the software might be considered “done”?

TeX and LaTeX are pretty close to 'done'

Nah. LaTeX is undergoing major development at the moment to support automatically tagged pdfs, and the latex3 work is still, as far as I understand, still ongoing too.

The race between LaTeX 3 and Half-Life 3 is still as exciting as it ever was.

"[a program] is never finished, only abandoned"

No, I think there is always something you can improve or add. The point, I think, is to do it carefully, though, without breaking things. Python is an example of how not to approach software evolution. Emacs and Clojure are examples of how software can be maintained over the long term without breaking backwards compatibility.

When I was young (and, ahem, stupid), I didn't care — I was all gung-ho, shoot from the hip, and if something breaks, tough. As I matured, I learned that backwards compatibility and long-term maintenance should be valued and cherished. Not just because if you're not careful, you have to fix the things that break, but also because as you start doing more and more things in your life, you have less time for each thing and you'd rather move forward rather than spend time fixing things that break.

Python is an interesting example to choose as a negative example. I presume you are referring to the evolution from v2 to v3. The popularity of Python has exploded in recent years, possibly as a direct consequence of tough decisions and breaking backward compatibility. I guess it is a subjective topic and an individuals position depends on how they define success.

Yeah. I'm always a little confused by this. It's still one of the most popular languages and growing for a reason. It surely isn't perfect, but no technology is. The tradeoffs they made have worked really well for a lot of people.

When looking at stats for Python's growth we have to remember 2 things. The number of libraries on PyPi is inflated by the same spam phenomenon which has infected npm, producing ludicrous library upload stats. Second, a large section of the Python userbase is non-programmers using it in a lab context to crunch some data and produce a pretty graph. Might as well be R or Matlab.

True, I've seen this with my projects in general (even outside software), the quality goes down as the quantity (of people involved) increases.

True, I've seen this with many projects in general (even outside software), the quality goes down as the quantity (of people involved) increases.

I think that's just your own experience being extrapolated a bit too much. In my own industry I'm aware of a few dozen commercial products. Every single one has a first class Python API. Most only have the one Python API. All academic scientists and engineers in industry (in my field) use Python with a little Julia, Matlab, or C++. It's presence has grown a lot in the past decade. In IT, there's also Java, C#, and Go.

In a field as young as software, three decades is too long for almost any software tool to remain frozen. Many new ideas might have built up — especially as the world around you (and needs) changes. You might keep writing extensions for your tool, or release periodic updates, or freeze your tool and call it “done”, and write a new tool every few years… they are all different ways to handle the same underlying mechanics.

Not to jump down your throat, but "eMacs" is hurting my eyes.

I blame sTeve jObs.

eMacs is just about the only word that autocorrect refuses to spell correctly, no matter how many times I nudge it to. And they haven't even sold a product called eMac since 2006. It’s a recurring reminder that this phone is owned by Apple, not by me. Frustrating.

To be fair, this release supports LSP and TreeSitter (which is super cool), but these are features that were pioneered by other editors and available elsewhere long before emacs. These ideas wouldn't be coming to emacs if it weren't for the experimentation and polishing done elsewhere.

This is an emacs-centric world view and many of the same arguments applies to open source software in general.

Most definitely not. In fact, much of open source is haphazardly developed without regard for backwards compatibility, often also introducing change for no good reason (the word "cleaner" should always raise red flags).

Source: a certain developer/admin/netadmin with >30 years of experience using open source software.

As someone whose daily code editor was XEmacs during the heyday of UNIX wars, because Emacs wasn't as a friendly for GUI users, I really wouldn't call it an IDE, those were the things IBM, Borland and Microsoft were giving me on PC side.

I doubt if Emacs was a commercial product, that many people would bother to use it, same applies to VI derivatives.

If the experiece is above anything else out there, certainly it is worth paying for.

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