If only there was an editor which could act as an interpreter for Lisp directly ...
Additionally, in my workflow I open my editor across many many terminals, the startup time alone prevented this. With emacsclient it was faster, but I specifically DON'T want to have a window that shows all my other open files.
There are multiple different ways of separating project/workspace/etc. contexts in Emacs - tab-bar mode, persp.el, etc.
I appreciate customization; that's why I moved to Neovim and not to a full-blown GUI IDE (and I'll never use those). But that editor you speak of practically requires me to fix the idiocies of plugin authors that can't be bothered to run 7 tests on their code.
I get it, a lot of programmers are cult followers. I was as well. At one point though, pragmatism should prevail. The editor should ideally be non-laggy and not spit warnings after I move from one buffer to another. Just embarrassing.
Before anyone yells "skill issue!", I'll say that if any plugin author can make the editor crap the bed, then the editor is not good.
There are degrees to freedom. Complete freedom in such environments is a liability, not an asset.
Say hi to the others in the ivory tower. And remind them not to do selective omissions in their supposed counter-arguments to "win" an argument, and that it's a cheap tactic.
I've never had to declare Emacs bankruptcy.
10 years of good times with Emacs+evil and 35 years of vim.
Fwiw.
I had a soft spot for Emacs for a _long_ time (almost two decades)... FWIW. ;)
Key word: had.
NOT looking forward to it. But I suppose there's no other way.
I still view Neovim as a huge improvement over Emacs though.
Neovim unlike Emacs is an editor. Emacs is not a mere code editor, not an IDE, text-processor, or web-browser. Emacs first and foremost is a Lisp REPL, with a built-in text-editor. Without deeply understanding that aspect one can never truly appreciate the incredible power it grants you.
Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? Or watch videos? Or manage the library of your ebooks? Or track your expenses? Or control project management like Jira? Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? Or interact with LLMs? Or explore APIs like Postman? Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? Or find and read RFCs and manpages? Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia. Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? Or to order pizza? Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? OCR images with text? List, browse and code review Pull Requests, etc., etc.
In what sense exactly is Neovim/VSCode/IntelliJ/whatever is a "huge improvement", please tell us?
All of my professional experience, which is at this point substantial (though of course I make no claims that quality stems from quantity!), has showed me that smaller specialized tools always perform better -- in every meaning of the word.
To me Neovim wins because it's extremely snappy, it has no visual noise, and doesn't show me a warning from a random plugin down there in the command bar almost every minute (something which Emacs apparently will always do). And is configurable in a way I find intuitive. I never cared about all the directories where I am supposed to install my own Elisp files, and I still don't. I want a plugin manager and I want to issue commands to it: install, update, delete. Neovim's Lazy and Mason do exactly what I expect.
I was never, in almost two decades, able to look at how Emacs does things and think to myself "oh but of course it will work like that".
So no, I haven't used Emacs for anything except coding. And I don't intend to use Neovim for anything else as well (with the possible exception of lazygit integration, that one works great). Though I am also working towards having everything except my web browsers be in the terminal.
Again, many will say "skill issue" or "it's just not for you" (the smarter ones). Which, again again, I never denied. But I don't plan to mince words and I am tired of the (to me) unjustified praise for Emacs. It absolutely is not, not just for everyone, but not for most even, IMO.
If you have tamed it and find it intuitive, I am sure it empowers you. I never got to that point and I regret trying to fit in for such an extremely long time. But oh well, we live and learn. We live for sure. :)
I don't care what editor you use or like or moved on to. I use Neovim myself. But like I said, Emacs is not just an editor. Come back when you find a better replacement for a "Lisp REPL with a built-in editor", maybe then, the conversation start making sense.
The distinction you're making is too only technically correct. Emacs is still (also) an editor. I judged its editor abilities and found them lacking. Finally I woke up and understood it's not for me and moved on.
You can stop arguing now.
As a community of practitioners we should embrace the idea that not all tools have to be “ideal” for all users. Some people like hacking their editor, and some don’t. If software tools sink to the lowest common denominator, like the vast majority of commercial software, we’ll all be worse for it.
2. The ivory tower thing is dedicated to the parent poster sounding a bit elitistic and trying to imply I am doing it wrong and he's doing it right -- which I did not deny by the way (which is the really funny part) as my central point was "too much freedom is not good".
3. I completely agree with the notion that not all tools are ideal for all users. I used this sub-thread to express a strong opinion that Emacs allows the "too much freedom" thing that actually becomes much more of a hurdle for those of us that just want to get on with it. I was sure it's going to ruffle feathers which makes me commenting on it fairly stupid, come to think of it, because I was not looking to pick fights, but just to broadcast an apparently unpopular opinion and never engage with replies. Which I failed spectacularly. :D
> If software tools sink to the lowest common denominator, like the vast majority of commercial software, we’ll all be worse for it.
Here's the part where you and I will disagree. Your statement is correct on the outset but I take issue with it because I take it as a hint that Emacs > all other editors. Which cannot be stated as a fact, ever, not for any editor, not just Emacs.
It's their right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
With that being said, I also struggled with Emacs. Again, too much freedom. I don't want to care where am I supposed to put `.el` files. I want a plugin manager and to be able to tell it: install / update / delete. Neovim's Lazy and Mason do that and that's why I love them. Just earlier today some configuration of a plugin broke; it used git submodules and something got moved and the new revision used another mechanism. I literally fixed it in 5 seconds: deleted the plugin, installed it again, and configuration persisted and I didn't have to set it up again. Reopen a file (just input `:e` in the command bar), everything worked right away. Is this too much to ask of Emacs?
> They just seem to make breaking changes a lot more often.
That was my experience as well. Always some warning in the command bar or a full-blown stack trace. No thanks. I don't associate with amateur work.
My brain mercifully deleted all details. At one point I really had enough (and waiting for 19 years for an editor to get better is IMO having an angelic patience that Emacs did not deserve) and just moved on and forgot all about it.
> * I envy your brain's ability to excise editor-induced trauma.*
That's a really funny way of putting it, thanks. I am simply one of the people who never truly settles and if something irks me for long enough, I ultimately cut the toxic element. And yeah it's often painful.
But that also gave me my amazing wife. If I stuck with my toxic ex I would be absolutely nowhere in life right now.