A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015) (opens in new tab)

which-key being integrated everywhere has made discovery the easiest of ANY editor/IDE I've used. Imagine if there was a consistent place where the menu would pop up if you faltered any key combination. If I'm trying to go a git command in Android Studio (InteliJ) and I forget the command, I don't get part way through and see a popup list of contextual actions. I'm left to move my mouse to the right place, click, and then hope to find my git action in the menu I picked.

More common is the unified way that helm makes dealing with files (you can find similar things in Sublime / Atom / Vim distributions using Unite (or whatever they used these days)). Even though the better editors have this, it's not universal and still a differentiating factor for usability and consistency.

Spacemacs integrates Magit by default. Magit is the first version control interface complete enough that doesn't make me immediately nope out into a terminal for proper git commands.

In my primary projects, I need to edit XML, Clojure, YAML, SQL, Java, Makefiles, and Python files. Spacemacs handles syntax highlighting, autocomplete, refactoring, repl connection and evaluation (where available), project management (makefiles and maven support), and documentation lookups.

All of those text editors above have some excellent and unique redeeming qualities. But at the end of the day their actual language support tends to be weak.

Now I do Python work in Pycharm, R work in Rstudio, and SQL work in whatever IDE goes with my database engine. I use Nvim as my system $EDITOR but at work I'm using it less and less often. I love it and I'll never give it up, but it's becoming more of a hobby tool than something that helps me get things done.

The trick is the setup, but I've only had problems with minor edge cases (like coffeescript 2). Either way I'll spend an hour and use Elisp to fix it. Really nothing I've found is even close to as robust

On FreeBSD the syscons driver lets you edit the keyboard maps in a text file. I don't know how to do it in newcons. I forget how to do it in Linux. If all you care about is X, you can also use xmodmap (IIRC).

I've aliased magit-status in my shell and it spawns a new Emacs instance (no demon) and magit in a few seconds.

Combined it’s quite noticeable.

I still use Magit though, because it’s clearly the best git-porcelain around.

It makes everything trivial to do, even rebases become safe and friendly. Its definitely a git client on a league of its own.

The reason I loved it was the indentation logic underneath, it was solid and meaningful. Other IDEs would only do very local logic while in emacs, if something doesn't indent where it should, you know you grammared wrong. It was deeply magical and reassuring to me.

I'm an emacs user (in case it matters).

A lisper not leveraging sexp ala paredit/parinfer is odd.

Hehe, in retrospect it is so obvious, but I really did not see that coming.

;; set up ido mode (require `ido) (setq ido-enable-flex-matching t) (setq ido-everywhere t) (ido-mode 1)

Where do we put in (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/") ?

But I'm sure there are similar implementations out there you could copy from too.

There's even more to emacs than to vim, if you start using emacs for more than just editing, doing things that have no equivalent in vim (like reading email, browsing the web, using IRC, or reading RSS news feeds, etc). For every one of these extra things, there's new stuff to learn, and more time to spend configuring emacs first to just work with those things and then to customize it the way you like.

For me the time investment is well worth it, but there's no denying that it takes a lot of time. A lot of time.

No affiliation, I just think it's really neat.

So is there somthing inherent in org mode that just makes a pile of concurrent projects in a directory usable? eg do you just have project plans and mind maps for each "idea" or "product" in your org directory named by idea or is there just one file? or it doesn't matter and you just basically grep to find where you need to be?

And I do have basically the giant tv screens at my desk filling 120 degrees of vision except they're called monitors and there are 7 of them, almost entirely filled with text... except the one that plays baseball all day.

My main problem with learning emacs is usually any explanation from people tries to describe it in words and it's hard to grok, or they do videos but have customized the keyboards bindings so I have no clue how to repeat or translate their magic into operations on my machine. Every time I give it a good go, about once a year for a week, I get going pretty good but then have to really jump back into an urgent task and go back to the tools I know because at the end of the day what I need to do is get work done, not learn emacs. And so I forget. As a counter example I picked up Visual Studio 2017 in about a day having not used anything newer than 2008 in years. VS Code or Sublime were mere minutes. Emacs and vim, I've got basic proficency in them but even after multiple months of total trying with each over 20 year career, they haven't stuck beyond basic git commit editing.

Finally, what a lot of devs don't get, is your logical assertion that emacs or vim or what have you "Is just better" doesn't really resonate with people, even other engineers (who are born skeptics). What resonates with them are examples of WHY it's good, ones they can innately understand. It, like any Don Draper ad, is about translating the fundamentals to another person as succinctly as possible. Like any sales funnel, any friction is going to turn people off. So if you really want to sell Emacs or Vim or any other gospel, have a good sales pitch and don't get mad at people when they give feedback because "they're too much of a mouth breather like those folks in Farenheit 451 to realize what they're not getting".