Comment by iLemming
1 year ago
It's not "a problem," it's a difference in philosophy. Sure, VSCode comes accessible out of the box with minimal configuration needed and a GUI-first settings interface. But that comes with its own price - your config is more restricted in what you can do and fragmented across json files, settings menus, and extension options.
In contrast, with Emacs I can change any behavior of any function and command - built-in or third-party with amazing granularity. I can change specific parts of a function without rewriting it, and I don't even need to save that - I can just write a piece of Elisp in a scratch buffer, evaluate it, and test it out immediately.
Also, you are completely wrong with your notion that Emacs is outdated. Modern Emacs tools allow you to do things in a way no other editors let you - you can control video playback, read and annotate PDFs, search through your browser history, and automate things with LLMs.
Not to mention that the problem similar to the one being discussed in the thread would never happen in the Emacs world - nobody would ever get to publish a package with obfuscated Elisp code in it. You always will have full control over the code you download to use.
Yeah, I'm not wrong. Its terminology is antique.
As for the rest, been there and done that, but then you have to invest in your knowledge of Elisp, which has zero other benefits.
> Its terminology is antique
git uses "plumbing" and "porcelain" commands, referring to victorian-era plumbing systems. Adobe and other publishing tools use terms like "slug", "gutter", "folio", "pica". Debugging tools use terms like "trap", "dump", "patch". You're annoyed with what Emacs calls "window" and "frame"? And what about Tmux's "pane" and "window"; or "session" - "an ancient" term from the time of timesharing systems? Oh boy, if you afraid of words don't ever try to get into Haskell - those FP-crazies do use some real fancy words for their stuff.
> knowledge of Elisp, which has zero other benefits
The same way the knowledge of sql, or awk, or bash, or vim motions, or ssh, or tmux has zero benefits outside of their respective domains? What are you even talking about? I, for one, get daily gains, benefiting from knowing elisp - anything that has to do with text, just about anything can be automated with ease.
Just the other day - watching my colleague over Zoom, I decided to fix that for my note-taking. It took me fifteen minutes to write a piece of Elisp that OCRs any piece of text from a screenshot. Instead of disrupting my teammates all the time, I would now take a screenshot of a screen area with Flameshot, run my custom command and voilà - the text appears in my editor, and I can quickly grab it and use it in my notes.
I don't know where exactly "you've been" and what "you've done", but it really sounds like you haven't seen modern Emacs in practice. When one sees what people can do these days in it, it's hard not to get impressed.