Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

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I don't like Emacs. Emacs key-bindings are neither ergonomic nor do they make any sense in any way. They are barely consitent across modes, only if you are lucky. They are the way they are because they are old. And old people don't like change. Emacs has also several other problems. It lacks multi threading, the cursor can not be moved off screen. Autocomplete for C-like languages is a mess and really inferior to everything else I used. Compared to all other Lisp dialects, Elisp is the worst. It is not only by far the slowest, it also lacks essential features like namespaces. And then there is complete clusterfuck of conflicting "modes" and the lack of disposition to cooperate and unify within the community.

The reason why I'm so upset is, if you are a newcomer and look at Emacs what you see at first glance on the outside is basically total crap. But then people tell you that the learning curve is high and everything is awesome if you just learn.

Well my experience was, the more I learned the more crap appeared. One layer of crap after the other. Luckily everything could somehow be fixed with a lot of configuration and scripts. But the points I mention above are the lowest layer which can not be fixed with just a bunch of lines of Lisp like in the previous layers. So even at the core Emacs is crap.

It sounds like you were kind of against it from the start in which case you would never end up liking it. There is a huge learning curve and, to make the most of it, you really do need to learn Emacs Lisp. As for keybindings, you are free to remap them to whatever you want. Sublime's keybindings aren't exactly normal either and go against a lot of the standard keys for operating systems (I'm basing that off of Mac since that's what I use). I don't find them bad ergonomically, especially after setting the option key to be "meta". I actually prefer the Emac's keys in other applications like IntelliJ and AppCode.

I'd have a hard time using Emacs for a large project, especially one that is contributed to by many different people. IDE's just make life so much easier. The people who disagree with that statement are typically the Emacs (or VIM) gurus who have customized it so much that they would probably die if they had to use a stock installation.

Modes definitely add complication, but again, that's why Emacs is so customizable. It takes time, but you can set things up to where it's the best experience possible.

I do totally agree the key-bindings are neither ergonomic (they're actually inducing RSI issues) nor do they make any sense in any way, which is your first point.

However this is trivially fixed because in Emacs everything is configurable. Keymappings are very easy to change (I'm using my own, completely custom ones, in my own keymapping minor-mode). There's also the "evil mode" reproducing the very superior (compared to Emacs) vim keybindings. So it's not true that they cannot be fixed. Not only can keybindings be fixed but a) they should and b) it's trivial to do so.

I'm using my own minor-mode which contains all my keymappings. Doing it that way you'll hardly ever have conflicting shortcuts.

evil-mode is an option too for people who want the (way better) vi(m) keybindings.

Once you change keybindings, all documentation you find online doesn't apply anymore. Emacs has a large and active community, which I consider one of its main advantages that I don't want to lose.

That being said, Emacs has already forced me to re-learn basic things like copy/paste and search/replace. I don't want to question my workflow on such a low level in 2014, when there is much higher-level IDE stuff to learn (code completion engines, refactoring, "jump to definition"). Alas, such features are not language-agnostic, they are tricky to set up and not standardized.

I find discussions about keybindings quite derailing from the higher-level discussions we should be having instead.

You can always use god-mode if you don't like holding C so much. Then you can just hold p or n to move the line.

https://github.com/chrisdone/god-mode

I am using evil-mode since i switch from Vim to Emacs and i am obsessed. Don't get me wrong , VIM is well VIM (awesome!), but some emacs plugins are more polished that VIM's ones and i can't stand vimscript.

Which ones? I had the exact opposite reaction to trying to use evil. I liked it, I like lisp, but the plugins where so crufty and sensitive. I got most of what I wanted working, but never got good tags support working, never got good generalized fuzzy finding working (tags, buffers, files), and never got used to the "culture shock" when I dropped out of evil mode in another buffer.

But you like sucky elisp?

IMHO is better than sucky vimscript.

As in other editors the key-bindings are completely customizable. E.G. I rarely use the arrow keys. I use WASD and UIOJKL crosses for different levels of navigation of code and projects. Intuitive? No. But very handy once you get used to it.

I agree with the language support. There might be better editors for every single language. But overall its the editor I like most of all I tested and used.

I don't know LISP very well and can't compare the speed to others. Yet emacs feels snappier than all the modern editors I've used. Probably just because it doesn't use fading effects and such nonsense.

And I'm not some beardy programmer from the punch card ages. Hell, the editor is older than me. But I do configure the shit out of tools I use every day. On that road, I haven't come to any limits in emacs.

I would never recommend it for a newcomer nor to people that want out of the box solutions for a specific domain.

I dislike the default emacs bindings. I use EVIL (vi bindings) so I get most of the normal usability, but with better extensibility (vi can't compete with SLIME) and much better config files (vimscript is terrible).

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