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Even more batteries included with Emacs

354 points by signa11

by QwenGlazer9000

5 subcomments

All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix.
I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg
Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.

by Steeeve

1 subcomments

Back when I was on usenet, it was a common joke that all real programmers used emacs - and at the time I was a vi guy. It took me so long to get the muscle memory to do what I needed in vi that I thought I'd never change. But sure enough, I'm a nerd, and just like when I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I decided to spend two weeks learning emacs. Absolutely frustrating for a few days. But I've been on emacs ever since. Some years I didn't update my emacs config or install any updates at all. Some years, that's MOST of what I did.
No shade at all to VIM or any other community of evangelists who have taken the time to get all the power they can out of their toolset. What works for you works.
But between org-mode and the 70 other features that I've come to know and love (like projectile, flycheck, ivy, m-x butterfly, yasnippet, etc.), I'm never looking back. I will occasionally use another tool for a specific purpose, and sometimes those tools have features and niceness that is hard to beat, but most of what I do professionally is just plain typing and I'm way more productive in emacs than any other typing tool.
Pretty cool that after all these years I can see an article like this and learn a thing or two as well. Thanks OP!

by glimshe

3 subcomments

Prediction: Emacs will reach super intelligence before Claude.

by internet_points

2 subcomments

TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation of the same.
And compare-windows looks really handy. I was about to write a note in my init file to my future self telling me to start using that, but then I saw there is already a note there from my past self, telling me about compare-windows.
scroll-all-mode seems useful, but it seems to only handle keyboard scrolling, not mouse-wheel?

by tptacek

11 subcomments

I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.

by buzzwords

5 subcomments

I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.

by quertyrecord74

0 subcomment

Also karthik is the author of gptel mode.

by mintflow

0 subcomment

Nice write up about Emacs, ruler-mode is a thing I never used before.
Recently I finally start to C-X M-x to do text scaling, the typing is hard even as near 2 decades user of Emacs.

by noelwelsh

8 subcomments

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a dent: when people boot it up it has to have the good stuff right in their face. This also means ditching the "vanilla Emacs only" snobbery.
That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.

by zelphirkalt

0 subcomment

Cool blog post. Though I think the blog post would benefit from having a table of contents. Some things one might know about or not be interested in, but one has to scroll through them anyway.

by jr_isidore

0 subcomment

Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages.
This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.

by gnulinux

5 subcomments

My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024.
> This is largely a discoverability problem
In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!)
Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...

by justinhj

0 subcomment

Both Emacs and Neovim reward rtfm and working up from a vanilla configuration to your own custom one.
The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality.
I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more.
In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.

by shevy-java

2 subcomments

Emacs is a great OS. If you complement it with vim then you may have a working editor as well, provided you know how to exit from vim.

by ascii0eks84

0 subcomment

nah, vi/vim forever.

by DonHopkins

0 subcomment

I LOVE Emacs, but I HATE it when I have the irresistible urge to edit text, but Emacs has dead batteries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo