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Comment by kev6168 | Hacker News Reader

This might gets downvoted into oblivion, but my thinking on editor choice is that I either use the lower level pure text editor such as Vim, Sublime Text, Nodepad++ for their speed, or if needed I go all the way with the big ones, like Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA/Netbeans, for all their bells and whistles.

Should I spend time and effort on the middle ones? I admit my feeling comes from standing on the outside lurking. Emacs masters of course know that this 'middle one' feeling is non-sense.

But from the perspective of a newbie who sets out to master an editor/IDE, considering the ratio of effort spent on learning/customization/configuration vs. productivity gain (in a certain time span, let's say 20 years), I am trying to decide to take the plunge and learn emacs seriously, in the midst of big IDEs, Atom/Bracket, Neovim (let's hope it delivers).

Now please tell me I am so wrong.

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I'd argue that your "spectrum" misses where emacs really shines: nobody really bothers to reconfigure Eclipse or Netbeans as their mail client or web browser, whereas this is not entirely unusual with emacs. This is because emacs has both a simpler set of underlying elements and a richer extension language when compared with something like Eclipse. This makes it IDE-like, but much more expressive and elaborate: there are things you can do with emacs that you could only dream of doing in things like Eclipse.

Furthermore, writing extensions for emacs is much more pleasant than writing extensions for Eclipse, and is done much more widely. And, emacs has been around long enough that you have literally decades worth of extensions already available to you. Additionally, emacs is used widely enough that people are quick to add emacs support for new things: if I pick up a new esoteric language tomorrow, I can be 99% sure that there's no Eclipse support for it, but I can be 100% sure that there's already an emacs mode for it and it's probably on the emacs package manager already, to boot.

All this is both a plus and a minus, in some ways: learning emacs is probably not worth it unless you're willing to put the time and effort into building up your emacs configuration into something IDE-like, but if that's what you want to do, then emacs can do truly amazing things. So yes, what you said rings more or less true for vanilla emacs, but you're radically underselling emacs as a platform for building better things.

> Now please tell me I am so wrong.

I don't know if you're "so wrong", but if your concern is speed, then you should just learn about emacs-server and emacsclient.

Emacs covers the whole spectrum of "basic editing" to "wizardly stuff you couldn't have imagined" and you can transition between those at your own pace.

Also, I think that if you are putting Vim in the same bin as Sublime and Notepadd++, you're probably still missing a lot.

Emacs is an interactive programming environment for building your own text editor. It is what you make of it. Vanilla Emacs is very middle-ground, just like you say. My personal Emacs is an extension of myself, with lots of functionality only I use. Emacs lets me utilize my skills as a programmer to enhance my everyday interaction with text. This is the promise of Emacs. It is what you make of it.

Emacs is a repl for the programming language elisp.

It has a lot of elisp functions (1.6m lines iirc) that are very useful for shaping text including, but not limited to, almost everything that people think is so unique to IDE.

Elisp and the editor pieces within Emacs are focused on providing you the tools to manipulate text of all types and from many different sources and outputs, not just a few programming languages.

People write academic papers, books, organize their lives and yes program with emacs.

Yes it's much much more then an ide.

Whatever you do, master something and become truly fluent with it. It's worth your time and will pay you back many times over.

> big ones, like Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA/Netbeans, for all their bells and whistles

How many languages do your "big ones" support? How easy it is to add a support for a new language?

When I have used Unixy systems, I've always used the emacs-nox packages, which is pure command line. Vi/Vim breaks my brain worse than Emacs. So Emacs is really my low-level text editor; I usually use it for notepad++ type stuff.

It's not a terrible investment of effort to learn Emacs for these kinds of limited uses. I don't know anything about the more advanced modes, or the more non-standard/essential key combinations, but I get by for what I ask of it.

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