| ▲ | frankie_t 4 days ago | |
> lags behind in features of modern editors I have been using emacs for around 7 years, but it never worked for me as the main editor, it just sucked too bad compared to IDE-like features of other editors and actual IDEs. So I only used it for org-mode, doing an attempt to use it for something else every couple of years. I'm currently in the process of trying this again, and I have to say things feel very different this time. By adding native tree-sitter and LSP support, the IDE-like features are outsourced to where they should be done. It wasn't perfect, but I had issues of the same degree or worse with other editors. A proprietary IDE still would beat it in stability and features, but the experience is _crazy good_ for free software. What I like the most is the hacker mentality it encourages. When I see something I don't like, I don't go like "I wish they did it differently", I ask "well how do I change that?". The only thing that feels truly outdated is single-threaded nature and blocking UI when long-running operation (like an update) is happening. And maybe non-smooth scroll (there is a package but it makes text jump). | ||
| ▲ | Karrot_Kream 4 days ago | parent [-] | |
To add onto this, I really don't think emacs has that big of an initial learning curve nowadays. If you enable cua-mode and get the LSPs working, you get the same experience as any other big editor like VSCode or Zed pretty close to out of the box. The arrow keys, mouse, and cut-copy-paste do exactly what you'd expect. There's menus, there's toolbars, there's scrollbars. Don't let the "emacs ricer" screenshots fool you; a lot of people disable those things for aesthetic reasons. Probably the kludgiest thing emacs has still is the default scrolling mode which scrolls through a page and then bumps the entire page forward by 1, like older editors. You can change these with a few lines in your config. Alternatively you can get good out of the box experiences with an emacs distribution (like Doom Emacs) or one of the many minimal configs out there (I'm partial to [1]) Lumping this in with something like vim/neovim is a bit silly because the basic navigation commands and editing experience of emacs is mostly the same as other editors. Sure, underneath this is all run by an Elisp VM and an event loop which maps Elisp commands to keypresses, but as a user you only need to dive in when you feel comfortable. | ||