Hacker News Reader

Comment by mustermannBB | Hacker News Reader

That's why I said IMHO. I tried Emacs in 2023 and 2024 and to me it is still way too clunky, gets in my way all the time and has , what I consider, bad defaults and to me very bad ergonomics. It literally negatively impacts my hands. And performance was nothing special either for me. It is however very powerful, I agree with that.

View on HN

I don't know what to tell you. I myself never got into Emacs on the first try. It took me about two years of constant debate and deliberation. At that time, I was using IntelliJ and had been for seven years. I knew it extremely well and was very happy with it. Yet, seeing what’s possible with Emacs continuously fueled my curiosity. I was annoyed by my own inability to finally understand what makes it so great. Little by little, I started finding features and packages that were awesome, but I still kept stumbling on other roadblocks that ruined the whole experience. At some point, instead of blindly copy-pasting Elisp snippets, I tried to dissect and understand them and had a few aha moments. Finally, one day, I decided that instead of reaching for the tools I knew well already, for every problem at hand, I would try to figure out how to get it done with Emacs. It was very slow at first, but after a couple of weeks, I felt more productive than I ever was with other tools. A few months later, I received a notification about having to extend my IntelliJ license, and I realized that I didn’t need it anymore.

Emacs is extremely empowering, although it comes at a cost, even though technically it is free. For some people, including myself, that time is the best lifetime investment. I have never regretted the time and effort I spent learning it. Even with the plethora of features that constantly get added to VSCode, I have zero FOMO. I do occasionally fire it up just to make sure I don't get stuck in my bubble. Once you understand how advising functions work in Emacs and realize that you can redefine any behavior of any function, whether third-party or built-in, it gives you incredible authority over absolutely any textual data you have to deal with on your computer. Check this out: I can perform a search that looks for things on Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, my browser history, and other sources (this is customizable). Then, I can select any given url and send it to an LLM to extract a summary. After that, I can create a note with a deadline and schedule to review it at a specific date and time, or add this stuff to my Anki cards collection. All that without ever leaving Emacs, and with just a few keystrokes.

If you ever feel curious about it again, maybe try Doom Emacs. Who knows? Maybe this time, it will be different.

Again I agree that Emacs is powerful and can be an excellent tool. Never disputed that. But it still, again, to me is clunky. I dislike its defaults, its interface, the ergonomics. Also I have no use for many of its offerings. Could I configure it to something I find tolerable, I could but to me the return is simply not worth it. I simply would use emacs as (sourcecode) editor and for that other offerings provide me with what I want and need with only a fraction of the cost and investment needed and my hands thank me to boot. I tried Doom Emacs (and Prelude and Spacemacs) as well, it just made realize I could just use neovim if I wanted vim bindings. I tried Emacs and gave it an honest go multiple time and simply did not like it or like it enough to invest further into it. The alternatives for me simply do better job for what is important to me. And just like you I have zero Fomo with my decision.

Ah, yeah, the pace at which Neovim is developing actually makes me more envious than the VSCode world. One can use Fennel to configure it and probably get the REPL running, getting very close to how Emacs operates with Elisp. To be honest, if I didn't already know Emacs and had to choose today between Neovim and Emacs, I'm not completely sure which way I would go. I've been using Vim for a long time, and the advancements in recent years are pretty awesome. My Neovim config is minimal because I know Emacs too well at this point to try scratching the itch and build some sophisticated config, but maybe I should give it a try at some point.

I don't think neovim is as strong as emacs when it comes to extensibility. It also has no self documenting like emacs. If one is committed to the philosophy of using emacs for everything or almost everything neovim would probably leave one wanting. I do agree however it has come a long way. It is good there so many strong options these days. And I will cede one thing about emacs and vim (neovim). They most likely still be around after whatever next big editor replaces vscode.

If you do try neovim again maybe check out (in case you may have not heard of it) https://github.com/Olical/conjure It was (is) pretty nice last time I used it.

Yes, I know about Conjure as I am a relatively frequent user of Fennel. One of my projects was, at one point, the third or fourth most starred Fennel project on GitHub. Thank you for reminding me about it; I may decide to borrow some ideas from it, as I'm finding more and more cases where Lua is used. The latest revelation is that mpv can be extended with Lua, and I just found out about it. I jokingly call Fennel "the best formatter for Lua code; it makes your Lua look much nicer..." :)

Thank you once again. I tip my hat to you, my fellow vimmer, as another die-hard vimmer who, quite amusingly, happens to be on Emacs.

Thank you, too for the friendly discussion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com