Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

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> I still view Neovim as a huge improvement

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?

Well you kind of answered yourself. After limping with Emacs for 19-ish years, during most of which I never made the serious effort you alluded to, I finally admitted I just don't have and don't want to have the mindset that's deemed necessary to make full use of Emacs.

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. :)

The point you're trying to make is meaningless. You're trying to compare two things of distinct categories. It's as if I said - "I like Zoom, we sometime use it for screen recordings", and someone replied: "I've moved away from Zoom for my screen recordings - OBS is such a huge improvement over it..."

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.

Emacs was sold to me as an editor however, and technically that wasn't a lie.

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.

Care to share your .emacs? :)

github.com/agzam/.doom.d

thank you!

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