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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Emacs is great for people who are fine tinkering with their tools, and adjusting them to their needs and tastes. Emacs improves my quality of life quite a bit.

A lot of people hate that, they want a tool that has all relevant to their tasks front and center, all irrelevant invisible or nonexistent, and zero options to tinker with. It should just work, and preferably never change.

A middle ground are the browsers that just work out of the box, but can be heavily customized by extensions. MS Office is another example.

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> A lot of people hate that, they want a tool that has all relevant to their tasks front and center [...]

A lot of people don't even know how to use their tools properly. I remember when I was teaching a number of Perl courses to programmers, they where joking about me using emacs while they where using vi or vim.

But while I watched them while they did their exercises, I constantly heard the "bing" sound when the cursor hit the end of the line. Why? Because they pressed the cursor key and waited for the cursor to travel to the end of the line, then chynged to insert mode to append stuff.

Even I, a humble emacs user, knew that there was a vi command to jump to the end of the line and append.

I'm not talking about hyper-flexible tools like Emacs or Perl. I mean tools that do one thing, and do it well, with zero tweaking needed, or even allowed. A hammer, a hacksaw, a copy machine, a vending machine, software like age, or like notepad.exe. They can be learned end to end in a rather short time, and if you pick a hacksaw in a different workshop, it's almost guaranteed to work exactly the same as yours.

Somehow in the same vein, some people prefer to write in C and tell the machine what exactly it must do, on a very low level, instead of picking an abstraction-rich language like Typescript or C++ or, well, a Lisp, where you typically operate in abstractions which you need to tweak to express your solution elegantly and correctly, but not very directly.

> a vending machine

It gave me orange. I wanted lemon-lime. Another one swallowed my coins.

But to be pragmatic, many tasks need more than one thing to be done (I think most of us compose our e-mail in a program which sends said e-mail out as well, for example), so the inflexible tools can be insufficiently convenient at times.

Also, consider the humble scissors. They do one thing and do it well unless they're the wrong handedness. Try using a right-handed pair with your left hand, it's terribly unwieldy.

> they want a tool that has all relevant to their tasks front and center, all irrelevant invisible or nonexistent

That is Emacs. You just have to drag the relevant up first and push down the irrelevant.

The thing is in Emacs, most utilities don’t want to presume how you would want some feature. Even if they do have defaults, they are suggestions at most. Instead of getting a tools that you have to learn and conform too, you get the template/idea/inital_version of a tool, and you make it your own

And there’s the whole idea of integrating stuff instead of isolated utilities.

Polite tools that assume competence are such a pleasure to use.

> [...] people hate that [...]

But that's just culture, and quite easily moldable. Lots of people would also rather gamble watch smut all day, but we decided that it's not the best way to go about life... so we set up a system (school) to manage their learning process, and shepherds them for well over a decade, and then involves them in the economy and in society. Likewise we have cultural mechanisms which try to ensure that people learn essential skills related to nutrition, mobility, relationships, etc.

A lot of this has been eroding in recent years under the banner of convenience, and will likely have pernicious consequences in the coming decades. I posit that letting the insidious patterns broadly drive our approach to computing is similarly dangerous.

Some people want to just "do work" and not build a toolchest over the years. I think if I find myself doing something once, I will probably be doing it again, therefore the environment can help me greatly with achieving that goal in far less time. There is a diminishing return for some tasks, but some things I have written in emacs save me minutes of time each time they are run daily.

> A lot of people hate that

It seems a curious attitude for a developer, though. My curiosity about how things work and the joy I get when I make a computer do the specific thing I want it to do for me are the reasons I program for a living.

Completely agree. At the same time, I'd wager a good chunk of developers isn't really in it for a love of computers and tinkering. Not a bad thing per se, just my observation.

Life is full of decision points. It is very understandable to use your decision budget on things that matter, like your projects or your job or your money, than things that don't like an editor config. Over my decades of emacs use I've had periods of crazy tinkering and conversely years of doing nothing.

I fit into this category so I might be able to explain. I'd like to learn emacs and build my perfect config for my WM and so on, but on top of that theres a long list of other stuff I want to do and build and learn. My time is finite and with all the other demands of life, my energy even moreso, so naturally I have to make sacrifices.

That doesn't sound like you "hate that", more like you're making a time management choice. I'd challenge it, as I find time spent on creating a good developmemnt environment pays off very well in overall productivity terms, up to a point, but it's your choice to make. Emacs certainly isnt for everyone, even among those that enjoy tinkering.

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