Comment by skydhash
3 days ago
You may have two dozens years of emacs, but I fear you’ve not grasped the philosophy of emacs, if that is the list of complaints.
> split windows.
Why would I want a new window to replace the one I’m in. If I want to look at an info manual, I want it to start in a new window instead of the one that I’m looking it. My understanding is that there are main tasks and secondary tasks. Switching main tasks replace the current windows, starting secondary tasks pop up a new one. And those pops up are usually dismissed by typing q.
> still litters #foo# and foo~ files in the directory of whatever you're editing
Backup files and autosaved files are good. Especially if the edited file is not versioned. It’s the correct choice as some users are not programmers.
> few language modes
How many toolchain are installed on a newly installed OS? And major modes are not only for syntax.
> LSP servers
Eglot is built in and has a good set of default for current servers. But why should Emacs install stuff for me. It does not know how I want to install them.
> macro over a 10,000 lines
macros do run the full set of the commands as it would run in a normal invocation time the amount of repetition. And there are other approaches like an awk script that may be faster for your usecase.
> common functions…bound to chains of two…three keystrokes
Emacs have a lot of commands. And if you used something a lot, you can bind it to a more accessible bindings.
> mysterious ctrl-u prefix
If it’s mysterious after two dozen years, then I wonder if you ever give the manual a glance. It is for providing an argument to the command and it’s commonly used for providing an alternate behavior to the default one. Like ‘g’ is recompile in a compilation buffer and ‘ctrl-u g’ asks for the command to use for the new iteration instead of reusing the old one.
Nothing says "prompt interactively" like Ctrl-U. I mean, it literally stands for "universal argument", which is basically "do this command, but different". Defaulting to "insert four times" because why not? Mysterious :^)
Like I said I used emacs for a quarter century, wrote quite a bit of elisp for doing my job, and I still miss some of those things, but I've made do with perl scripts. I still pop up emacs for quick edits now and again, but I long ago gave up trying to force it into the shape of a full-blown IDE.
> Backup files and autosaved files are good.
Your parent wasn't saying they weren't. He just doesn't want them in the same directory. I've set up my config to dump all these in a dedicated directory.