Emacs is a relic, it can take weeks of configuring to get it anywhere near as productive as something like VS Code or Jetbrains IDEs. If you want to procrastinate for a few months it's the perfect tool.
People were saying that when I started using it, over 20 years ago. Apparently I was supposed to be using Notepad++ or some MS program du jour which no one remembers now. I wouldn't be surprised if I keep using it for the rest of my career.
> it can take weeks of configuring
More like decades ;)
> to get it anywhere near as productive as something like VS Code or Jetbrains IDE
Nope - it's significantly more productive. At least for me - I can't speak for you, but I do seem to be much faster at processing text than any of my colleagues who are using those other editors.
All the configuring is by design. You can set up the editor to take advantage of your strengths and paper over your weaknesses.
This can only work if the editor internalizes the corresponding language. That does not scale for all languages available.
That’s exactly what the language server protocol is all about (and certainly what parsers like tree sitter are there for). Emacs can connect to those and acquire semantic analysis capabilities. The degree to which such a semantic language features will work for you will also depend strongly on the language, of course.
If you use a commercial editor it’ll jump start you for the popular languages. But, say, you wanted to program in Raku or Scheme you’ll also going to need to fiddle around.
So the Raku server has a deficiency, currently. Too bad. But in Emacs you can work around that by writing into your config file:
(remove-hook 'xref-backend-functions #'lsp--xref-backend t)
(remove-hook 'xref-backend-functions 'eglot-xref-backend t)
This will not turn off "finding references" completely because Emacs happens to have a default backend called "etags-xref-backend" based on a reverse index file. You can easily generate that in your project directory using a shell tool shipped with Emacs or even execute that automatically from inside a git commit hook. So Emacs can stand in until Raku's language server is fixed.
So ... while you would be in trouble with a commercial editor now, you can continue hacking happily thanks to Emacs' flexibility.
It's true.
The thing is, so is Unix.
And yet we use it.
So is macOS because it's a Unix™. So is Windows, it's just a newer relic (from 1993 instead of ~1973).
We don't have anything left that are not relics any more. The relics got good enough that we stopped trying.
Nicely put.
Yes, I think there is room for a lot of innovation yet in many areas: OS design, programming language design, input devices, GUIs, and much more besides.
Saying that, when implemented well, there's a lot of stuff that's pretty good.
I think one aspect that's neglected is that yes, some tech we all use is very old and legacy-inspired. But often, it's not that we use some ancient thing because it's ancient and it hasn't changed. It's because it had lots of competitors but it beat them all.
For instance, QWERTY. Yes it is very old and yes it came from typewriters.
But I own 2 computers with
ABCDEF
GHIJKL
MNOPQR
STUVWX
YZ
... layouts. There are also QWERTZ and AZERTY used by millions. Dvorak failed to its inventors' deep misery. (No, not Dvořák, although Dvorak was a descendant of Dvořák.)
There have been tonnes of others tried.
The survivors are the ones that beat out the competition.
And in some instances, the competition survives and does OK in its little niche, and that is fine, too...