Comment

Comment by xlii

I’ve been using Emacs for ~15 years right now, but I don’t recommend it for the last few.

I love it, it’s great, and as many others, I tried to move out of it but there was something I couldn’t do I KNEW I could get in Emacs and it frustrated me so much I kept going back.

But I don’t think it brings a lot of added value. There are many very very powerful IDEs and editors which offer out of the box great UX and feature discoverability. Hell, probably if IntelliJ toolset would allow me to customize it deeper with Lua/Lisp/JS/whatever I’d probably switch in a jiffy.

I compare Emacs to vinyls or paper books. It requires investment, in many cases it is worse than competition and requires more energy to just be on par. But it is absolutely lovable. Vinyl record comparison - they are expensive, heavy, require a lot of maintenance but for specific type of people it makes their heart skip a beat when they take it from the sleeve.

That’s why people are constantly talking about their Emacs. Same with vim or nvim. I rarely hear people talking with excitement about WebStorm or VS code.

So yeah, if you’re not into it just keep in mind that like some freak who spend their weekend on polishing rims of dream come true 1959 Fiat 500, some of us spend their time with Emacs.

Don’t get bullied into it, don’t get FOMO about it, but please don’t spoil our fun.

You’re always welcome to join in.

parent xlii 3 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton