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14 pointsudev409619 comments

> "It's terrible using this system. I must use four editors each day to get my studies done, because not one of them does everything."

The apprentice has yet to learn Emacs. Once mastered, Emacs becomes the system.

True enlightenment only comes after upskilling into XEmacs.

:D One of my late friends was a core XEmacs dev.

Edit: I intended to make a quip about systemd being orthogonal to UNIX philosophy, and how churn novelty and platform-specific idiosyncrasies break the contract of robust, portable, stable compatibility, but I'll be over here mumbling to myself in the corner instead.

> Emacs

I have heard much about this editor, about its supposed war with Vim, and yet after twelve years in the IT world doing both support and software dev, I have yet to see anyone use Emacs in the wild. Not even ironically.

It's actually really nice, and I say that as someone who started using vi in 1992 (First Oak Hill, then vim aroud '98). IMO emacs with evil-mode is a better vim than vim.

Have you tried the post-vim vim-alikes? neovim and such?

1. Neovim doesn't have a gui built in, and the ones that I have tried were kind of "meh." I've been using gvim for 20ish years.

2. Vim 8 added async support which, IMO was the "killer feature" of neovim. Built-in LSP is nice I guess, but LSP is often a bit of a pain to integrate with my workflow, and when I do, ALE (which I already use for linting) has me covered.

3. For more modern takes on modal editors, kakoune was by far my favorite; Helix had an impedance mismatch with how I edit text[A]

4. Lastly, vim and evil-mode are so similar that if/when I'm stuck in vim on a remote terminal, my muscle memory works great. With my configuration, literally the only difference (modulo C-z, which is the emacs escape-hatch) is case-matching replacement with "/" which evil-mode does and vim does not.

A: Though I must say thath when I brought them up to the community at the time, they seemed very open to addressing these issues; I had only positive interactions with the Helix community; people were super polite and nobody tried to YX problem me, which is unheard of in an IRC channel.

The Emacs-vi war is ancient geek lore, nowadays usage statistics are probably 67% VSCode, 30% unassorted IDEs, 2% vi/m, 1% Emacs.

You’re probably an order of magnitude off about Vim. The 2023 Stack Overflow survey reports it at 22.59% for professional developers:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...

There maybe up to 1.5M ± 50% emacs users but they tend to clump in academia, around Dvorak keyboards, and rms. :]

By contrast, there are roughly 27M software developers in the world. Suppose 30-50% of them primarily use a vi-derived editor.

These factors and others make emacs a seemingly rare bird to spot in the wild when it's there.

Editors and tools, always use what improves the productivity of your team and you.

I use it. But honestly the reason why is because in 2005 or so I got a web job and my manager sat me down at a Solaris sunray running thr Java desktop environment (gnome) and told me to click on XEmacs to edit code.

Now I stay because lsp makes it good for every language and then org mode and tramp and babel and eshell are just game changers.

I don't see too many emacs users. My old director at Walmart Peter was one iirc.

Emacs, and XEmacs (the one I favoured), were my way to make for lack of mature IDEs in UNIX, me missing out on Borland and Microsoft stuff, between 1994 and 2005 when coding on UNIX.

Eventually since moving into managed languages, alongside the uptake of Eclipse, Netbeans, KDevelop, QtCreator, JetBrains products,... I stop using it as my default UNIX editor.

However still install it, just in case, too much muscle memory regarding meta commands and elisp.

Emacs, web browsers, and hypervisors are systems/platform inception. Not sure which critter in Animalia it is all the way down, but it could be turtles or giraffes.

> "Fool!" says the wizard. "Do you think I want to learn yet another editor?"

The supposed 'wizard' is no sage. Every sage uses emacs.

Lowest. Common. Denominator. Every sage switches Visual Studio Code to vi mode.

And the mega corp requires use of a fork of vscode with a limited number of plugins, including ones that run completely client-side that would increase productivity greatly.

Next, they'll demand RTO, Colemak keyboard layouts, and faded 13" 4:3 CRT monitors.

Nooooooooooooooooo.....

Every sage who started using linux in the mid 90s thanks the gods of internet twice a day for better and better editors because he does not need to say "how the fuck do I get out of this shit" when he lands in vi by mistake (vi took its name from that expression, a less known fact,)

Evan Martin - there's a name I haven't heard in many years

A better punchline: "Fool! That's how we ended up with four editors in the first place!"

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