I’d like to echo the sentiments of Reddit user tikhonjelvis, who commented¹:
“Man, I knew CS programs were skimping on Emacs fundamentals, but I hadn't realized it was this bad.”
1. <https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gqj7qa/my...>
But this has been a line in my shell config since I was teenager.
export EDITOR=vim VISUAL=vim # Viva vim, death to emacsEmacs is an extremely esoteric program, from shortcuts, to documentation, to package management (should you use elpa? melpa? melpa-unstable), to configuration (I love Lisp, but it's much more esoteric than JSON), to bugs (who has regular UI locking as an expected part of the experience, e.g. when using eglot, in 2024?).
I love emacs, and tinkering with it, and will probably never stop using it. That doesn't mean it's a real option for someone who doesn't want to make it a hobby.
I can't be sure, though, because using Emacs as an expert is definitely better than using those other systems as a beginner, so I haven't gotten around to getting over the learning curve.
It is still very very good IMO
having been a somewhat longterm user of IDEA, Vim, Atom, and Eclipse
The addition of elisp JIT compilation even makes its performance more than adequate
I first started using Emacs in 2015 or so, sometimes still relying on other editors (usually IDEs) alongside it.
I was still in school then. By then, I'd used for varying lengths of time (and had been taught, to varying degrees): DrScheme, BlueJ, Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ IDEA. (I'd also used vim, Kate, and Notepad++, but I used those mostly for editing configuration files, plaintext notes, and shell/batch scripts. Vim was the only non-IDE editor I'd ever used for any real programming, which amounted to my coursework for a few classes in college.)
I didn't dive in with writing my own config from scratch, but started with Spacemacs as someone with prior (and merely casual) vim experience. It was better in some ways and worse in others than those 'modern' IDEs I'd used previously. Performance was worse (although resource usage was much better) in that sometimes Emacs would hang or pause for slow operations. Startup time was slow, but client/daemon support made that invisible. The total stack I ran was noticeably buggier than alternatives like JetBrains, because a distro like Spacemacs glues a ton of external packages together. Spacemacs releases were infrequent so I ran against development branch, inviting more bugs.
But the main thing that struck me was how nothing else I'd ever used was as easy to learn as Emacs. I loved all the search-driven workflows and interfaces, how fuzzy-filtering was everywhere. I loved how running commands 'manually' always showed and reminded me what their keybindings were. I found myself learning many more keybindings than I ever did with other editors/IDEs, because they were so easy to look up, and looking for many more 'interactive functions' (commands) than I ever had before, because they were so easy to search. It had quirks, and I was grateful to have a 'starter kit' in Spacemacs (without which I likely never would have picked it up). But overall it was clearly, decisively better than anything I'd ever used in virtue of its radical discoverability alone, and I quickly built up muscle-memory for the Spacemacs bindings.
Automated refactoring and advanced code navigation were clear weaknesses, though. That's why I sometimes used JetBrains IDEs for some languages in the years immediately following.
Nowadays I'd say things look even better for Emacs as compared fo IDEs. It has pretty good performance, and more and more packages do things asynchronously where it makes sense. Virtually every programming language has one or more LSP implementations, so good code navigation functionality is easy to come by and old tools like etags can still be used as seamless fallbacks. (I don't do much work in static languages lately so idk how good the refactoring support for popular LSP implementations really gets, but basic refactoring in Python seems fine.) Emacs even gets along well with the new 'AI' hotness; its documentation culture and fine vintage mean that ChatGPT and friends are better at writing and explaining Emacs Lisp than the vast majority of programming languages, plus they 'know' lots about not only Emacs built-ins and popular packages, but even the configuration idioms and special macros of popular Emacs distributions like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs.
I no longer use any other IDEs anymore because I don't see any reason to for my current use cases, though I do still use Vim a little. Recently, I've started occasionally using VSCode to test things on behalf of my users at work, who are other developers. Far from decaying or falling behind, I think Emacs has become a steadily more attractive alternative to IDEs since I started using it. I don't begrudge anyone their VSCode or JetBrains IDE if that's what they've already chosen, but I'd still recommend Emacs (with a good starter kit) over either to programming novices today.
If you want the absolute minimum learning curve then perhaps there are better options, but I'm pretty sure you'll be stuck at a local maximum there.
From that blog post (2022):
> In addition to terminating all sales, all of our offices in Russia, including Moscow, Novosibirsk, and St. Petersburg were shut down. Work on the new campus in St. Petersburg was also terminated. All R&D activities were gradually stopped and liquidation papers for our Russian legal entity were filed in August 2022.
[1] A contemporary joke went (hope the translation works): “Durex has announced it is leaving Russia. When asked for comment, the company’s representative responded, ‘Not our fucking problem now.’ ”
Each was going to kill Emacs.
Somehow, I think I'll be using a version of Emacs until the day I can no longer type.
Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting months getting up to speed on the latest and greatest thing every 8 years or so.
This adds up over a career.
Oh, and by the by, this was written in Emacs using GhostText as the link between Firefox and Emacs.
Yeah I used to think this way, because you're right: becoming proficient in emacs takes significant effort and time.
But becoming proficient in VS code takes maybe 25 minutes. 25 minutes to change IDEs every 8 years or so doesn't seem like an onerous requirement to me.
Emacs just has extremely poor defaults and out of box UX.
Recent research has confirmed that this is an actual phenomenon: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-35017-7_...
Discussed on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36721055
If IDEs help you work better, that's great. Do not presume your experience and preference generalize to all.
The one exception is maybe untangling particularly gnarly git conflicts.
Not really my thing but I guess it works for them.
There's no way to unify it given how many different moving parts are involved. Trying to fit this all within an IDE would be a project of its own...
* rg with telescope window to quickly find text in very large code basis is essential.
* Pressing spc, spc, to bring up a telescope window of my open buffers and typing in text to narrow them, very important.
* To date I still struggle to get the LSP to work the Linux kernel on VSCode, but on Neovim I got it working.
IDE's have a lot of menu clutter that I struggle to make good use of-most programmers working on user-space apps, it is likely fine, but for the kernel, we often need more control.
First I've heard of this. As a long-time vanilla Emacs user, I'm using consult-ripgrep and rg-project for ripgrep interfaces, consult-buffer for fast buffer and file switching, Eglot for LSP integration (mainly with clangd), etc. I've also got org-mode for note taking, magit for speedy Git manipulation, etc.
And all without any visible menus or clutter.
I suspect that a power Emacs user and a power Neovim user are more akin here to each other than to VS Code users.
-- debugging with print statement because they don't know how to use a command line debugger
-- using find and grep to find files/methods
-- hand-formatting files because they don't have a inline formatter or something to notify them when they've missed a semicolon or spelled a method wrong.
I strongly encourage them to move to an IDE because I can't stand looking over their shoulder and watching them code so inefficiently. There probably are vim plugins to handle many/all of these things, but if a developer doesn't put the effort in to find them than they're just hurting they're own productivity.
Besides, typing speed is usually not the limiting factor in programming speed. I think overall efficiency needs to take a broader look.
I was like that about 20 years ago, working with Eclipse and later NetBeans for Java and Visual Studio for C# .net v1 (anyone remembers whole tomato extensions?).
I needed the IDE , the autocomplete, the debugger and all that. Nowadays, I do mostly Vim and Vscode for more complex projects. I don't know why, but I "grew out" of needing an IDE.
Some features that I do not have in nvim, but use daily in IntelliJ: Run configurations, proper debugger, SQL integration, hot reloading, and most importantly everything just working OOTB (auto complete, snippets, docs, ...). Can (n)vim do these things? Probably, but it'd take me days or even weeks to get it configured to the point where it's as seamless as IntelliJ.
I do use the IdeaVim plugin, so not all of my muscle memory is wasted.
ive never seen any vim-with-plugins setup come close to this
Whereas with VSCode, I really never have to leave the VSCode environment to do what I want. I can pop open a shell within VSCode and don't have to switch windows. I can easily open random files not associated with my project and VSCode does the right thing (usually). It opens images easily, renders markdown well, etc. my favorite feature is that you can pipe cli output directly to VSCode in the shell and then it opens a tab displaying that output. You'd be so surprised how often that feature comes in handy.
I really hope you’re wrong about that. I don’t want to be ruled by another Microsoft product
Example from VSCode Terminal: $ echo hello | code -
I think you missed the point of my comment you are replying to. You can get things done in any editor. The point is that Vim/Emacs have been around for decades and last your whole career, VSCode has been around for a fraction of the time and killed off the previous editor, Atom, that everyone though was "the editor".
I would definitely much rather install VSCode or an IntelliJ product on a Jr's machine, show them how to setup their terminal, get their dev environment setup, how to run and debug the app, and off they go. Edit code. Run code. Debug code. Rinse repeat.
Much more reasonable and preferable to having them spend months learning Emacs. Let's remember, they likely don't know how to use the terminal either these days.
Would that still be true if the ordering of your menus (and the items within, recursively) were randomly shuffled each day, and which side submenus opened on were also randomized? How about if the speed of your mouse or mouse acceleration behaviors varied?
I think you may be discounting memorization which benefits your workflow because that memorization is spatial rather than symbolic. Perhaps there's an argument to be made that such memorization is more natural, gradual, or easy, but there's definitely memorization involved in mousing around with any degree of efficiency or speed.
Which is a huge issue. If all you know how to do is crank up a GUI and write code, you are easily replaceable in a world where the demand for SWEs has gone way down. The best thing I ever did in my career is invest in learning how things actually work. Learning how something like Vim works is just a litmus test for absorbing and applying information quickly. Vim is just one in hundreds of tools I've learned how to use and string together.
I am also excited by the fact that the text editor configuration is programmable in a Turing-complete language, as opposed to pure JSON configurations that VS Code offers (correct me if I'm wrong, but settings are just a JSON file right?). It means that anything is possible.
In VSCode, my biggest complaint was that, for the Vim extension, the status bar was not configurable - I wanted to make the whole page change color when in "Normal" mode, versus "Insert" mode. Not possible in VSCode, but it's only a handful of lines of Lua in Vim.
Is that a huge productivity boost? No, but it makes me happy. Just as much as I want to be productive, I also want to be happy while programming
Just posting to balance things out for any entry level SWEs reading.
I'd just quit. If people in my company are making sweeping decisions that I disagree with (how much they are based in reality aside), I would just leave. If the company isn't aligning with you on something you feel passionately about, just leave. There are oodles of companies out there that would align with you on this.
There is rarely a suggestion given in modern society that doesn't assume a good amount of privilege, and pointing this out every time isn't helpful.
I welcome suggestions that can help those who cannot simply quit, but you didn't give such a suggestion, which is why I say it wasn't helpful.
Accusing people of privilege is a dead end. A person who has been accused of privilege is left without direction. It is better to say "what about these other people" than to say "you're privileged", because it directs attention to the other people. It avoids accusation and focuses attention on those in need.
If you’re reading this you’re privileged.
Somewhere on this planet is a single individual human who is the very unluckiest and most unfortunate. Everyone else is privileged. Even that guy is lucky to be alive now and not 1000 years ago.
None of this makes OP wrong.
Most HN readers can't quit their job on a whim without putting their household in jeopardy. That's the sentiment you're responding to.
Dev tool monopolies are as bad as any other monopoly.
Does anyone know what OOP is talking about here? VSCode is working just fine for me and I do not have a reddit account to ask it him myself
Have switched back to using neovim (my go-to during college with a crappy MacBook, lol) and set it up with nvchad to lazy load the LSP plugins.
Haven’t looked back.
Did it take months (gradually improving and re-learning) to get to this point? Yes, it did. But in the long run, I learned to be more efficient in my writing and removed a yearly subscription as well.
I really like Neovide as a gui. Brings the whole experience together.
And they're still considered Russian company, how hilarious.
They were choosing between being humiliated and losing customers, now they're both humiliated and losing customers.
>The official reason given was that Jetbrains has Russian ties. No amount of arguing could get leadership to reverse the decision.
Who are these people?
Intellij is a great product, I would still use it even if it were Israeli.
For example, when chick-fil-a was openly anti-gay marriage (including after Obergefell), I stopped eating there. As a gay man, I don't want my money going to people who actively wish to harm me.
And it's fine. It was low friction, and I've saved a lot of calories.
That doesn't mean you're then required to boycott everything. Perfect isn't the enemy of good. If you feel like it, boycott.
Yes.