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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

To go big here; I did Emacs for a year or two then gave it up because -- despite being probably the most theoretically powerful -- there's just too much friction.

I don't know if it's been given a name, but this new wave of (usually Rust) shell tools that are great and seem obvious in retrospect (fzf, rg, etc) strongly feel like they're doing exactly right what Emacs has "failed badly" at.

edit: And now that I think about it, the "failure of Emacs" thing feels a lot not going the old "Unix way, do one thing and speak text" ideals?

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I don't really understand the point being made. Virtually every popular unix-like command line tool integrates with the popular Emacs frontends. It's as trivial as going `consult-ripgrep` or `projectile ripgrep` and so on. There's significantly more friction for me in praying I remember a hundred terminal commands and tools than just having an actual UI.

I mean the other way around?

Living inside Emacs separates you from lots of "how everyone else does it" over time and is hard to integrate with "everything else" without TONS of work.

To avail yourself of the full power of Emacs, it demands more "difference from everything else?"

As a newcomer to Emacs in the past couple of months (my second try), I think I agree with you that it's a lot of work.

But for the Emacs fans who've had success, that work pays them back because they can bend the editor to an extremely bespoke workflow.

I'm unsure if it will work out for me long term but I can sort of see the appeal. No other tool even attempts to be what Emacs has become.

So yeah, it's different from every other approach I've tried. But there's a chance it will work for me. Jury's out, though, and I am only now realizing that I'm going to have to put more effort into hacking my workflow than with other things I've used (Kakoune, Neovim, sublime, etc)

I've been on both sides: emacs only and fish + cli toolig + neovim and there is certainly no "everyone" on the console side. "Everyone" lives in VSCode. People using console tooling do not invest less time into it compared to emacs folks and each setup is no less individual than an init.el

So, the "side" I mentioned here, I literally mean "ANYTHING not Emacs." Everything else you mentioned, even the neovims et al, do a far better job of "playing nicely with everything else" than Emacs.

I had a real "I wish magit was a TUI program and embeddable in Neovim, Emacs, your tmux sidepane" moment the other day.

No argument here, and I've been using emacs since around 1983. It's a hobby and a way of life. But like any way of life, it's for those who like that sort of thing.

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