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Comment by deafpolygon

2 months ago

And this is why I stay away from eMacs.

"Staying away" implies understanding the perils or benefits, I don't think you ever fully understood either. My point is not to bash on your choice of an editor — I use Neovim myself (it serves me well occasionally).

You "stay away" from Emacs most likely because you don't know any better. Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? Or watch videos? Or manage the library of your ebooks? Or track your expenses? Or control project management like Jira? Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? Or interact with LLMs? Or explore APIs like Postman? Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? Or find and read RFCs and manpages? Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? Or to order pizza? Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? List, browse and code review Pull Requests, etc., etc.

Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities.

  • I only know my perspective:

    I get the appeal of Emacs but this is exactly where it falls short for me. It’s brittle, monolithic, and too controlling (restricting).

    Emacs owns the entire platform. If you want to use an external tool, you have to wrap it in Emacs abstractions. That means dealing with buffers, subprocess plumbing, or writing Elisp bindings. You’re not really integrating; you’re translating everything into “Emacs-speak.”

    Meanwhile, tools outside Emacs—like in a Unix shell—are composable by default. I can swap fzf for peco, tesseract for ocrmypdf, or even Neovim for Helix without rewriting my entire environment. That’s real modularity. With Emacs, everything is wired together internally, so small changes can break big things.

    And yeah, I can technically replicate workflows inside Emacs, but often it’s reinventing worse versions of tools I already have—eshell instead of zsh, eww instead of a browser, magit instead of plain git in a terminal. That makes it feel more like a self-contained OS than a part of the system.

    I’d rather keep my editor focused and compose my environment around it—not inside it. Plus, I rather do certain things in Lua, Python, shell, etc. where I can call it and run it through awk, sed, rg/grep, and so on. I can port that to any other platform and adapt it quickly rather than try to rewrite Lisp.

    So... to answer your points specifically --

    Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? -- Sure. Using my PDF editor.

    Or watch videos? -- I think that's a little easier in shell (mpv, vlc) or directly in a browser.

    Or manage the library of your ebooks? -- Calibre

    Or track your expenses? -- I have a tool for that.

    Or control project management like Jira? -- Jira or their respective tool(s).

    Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? -- Neovim+Lua

    Or interact with LLMs? -- There's a shell script for that, browser, or the ChatGPT application.

    Or explore APIs like Postman? -- curl, wget, ... or Postman itself.

    Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? -- Inside Anki. I have a simple shell tool that goes through them as well.

    Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? -- In their respective apps?

    Or find and read RFCs and manpages? -- My browser, or the shell.

    Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? -- I think it's called a browser. Or the shell.

    Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? -- Browser. Or the shell.

    Or to order pizza? -- Browser. Or the shell.

    Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? -- You got me there.

    Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? -- You got me here, too. I don't have a need for this.

    Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? -- stow, git

    List, browse and code review Pull Requests, -- browser, git

    etc. -- etc.

    etc. -- etc.

    Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? -- I feel like I answered this.

    Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities. -- I'm aware.

    Thanks, this was an entertaining 10 minutes to write.

    • You perfectly just illustrated my original point of "without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing..."

      Saying "I can just use my pdf editor" is on the same level of "integration" as pulling another laptop with a pdf next to the one you have already. What I'm talking about is something like ITEE (Integrated Text Editing Environment), and you simply just don't get it. Emacs allows you to get closer to the plain text as possible. And the value of the plain text proposition is enormous. When every bit of information is reduced to text — it allows you to manipulate information more easily. In Emacs, everything becomes text — the list of directories and files? You can freely edit them — using all the editor features you have — multiple cursors, search-find-replace, macros, whatever. Extracting a bunch of URLs from a web page, or a PDF? Easy. Finding a specific URL from that list and retrieving a description for it? Piece-of-cake. Your browser history — it's just text. Various search engines? They are just a middle-man and you talk to them in text. Version-control interactions? All happen in text. etc. etc.

      Of course, browsers allow you to do a ton of interesting things, and btw. it's not using Emacs 'instead', but rather having a choice — e.g., I do use zsh, but some things I do in Eshell in a much more productive way.

      Browsers, shells, specific apps, scripting engines, etc. I have no problem using them when I see fit, but it really seems like you have zero idea how actually awesome it is to be able to not only perform spell-checking, but also consult the Merriam-Webster thesaurus, get the definitions for specific words (from another service), translate entire sentences and paragraphs (e.g. via google translate), parley with a bunch of LLM models, perform web search and etymology lookup, consult your own notes and knowledge-base, check through your browser history, etc. etc., and all that "on point" — in the same context and place where you're composing a piece of text. Like a comment you're replying on Hacker News. The mental model between approaches is just vastly different. It puts you into the "flow state" described by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And btw., If you think I had to leave my text editor even for a second, to lookup his name to mention it here — you still don't get it.