Comment by gnulinux
15 hours ago
My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024.
> This is largely a discoverability problem
In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!)
Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...
My guess is, that writing Emacs packages requires a lot of discipline, to only use the minimal surface one needs from Emacs. And that is, because of the huge amount of mutable global state in Emacs. An actual design flaw, that is sometimes super useful, but at other times super annoying.
I'm often amazed how things do not break more often than they do[1] given how deep a package can alter emacs intenrals.
[1] and they do break!
LLMs are a godsend in fixing emacs problems.
I have asked LLMs several Emacs-related questions and _never_ got a reply that works. And at generating elisp code they are especially awful.
Agreed, Claude didn't seem capable of doing anything but hallucinating "fixes" and breaking my config.
Same. I'm not an elisp expert by any means, so I tried using claude and chatgpt to help me write some functions. They got close, close enough that I could massage what they wrote into something that did what I needed, but they have never produced anything that just worked.
Not my experience. I've had them write modes for new languages from scratch with excellent results.
And diagnose and fix up my emacs configuration.
Even back in pre-Opus 4.5 days I found them incredibly useful for elisp diagnostics, and these days I use Codex to great effect to enhance my emacs setup.
That is not my experience. I had Claude add a variety of useful functions to my init.el as well as refactor it for easier maintenance. I now have a more useful to use and pleasant to edit init for it.
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Try asking it a coding question, one that doesn't diminish your self-worth.
Question: Why VSCode spyware? Why not at least VSCodium? Or is this just a case like people saying Chrome, when they have Chromium or Ungoogled-Chromium?
Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect something to break if your configuration isn’t.
I've used Doom Emacs for years and it rarely breaks. Sometimes things get out of sync, and I delete the git repo and clone it again. That happens once every few years.
People holding your attitude is one thing that keeps people away from Emacs. Very few people want to get into the weeds of customizing their editor. They want to do whatever it is they are interested in and the editor is tool to get it done. Doom Emacs, and other approachable "distributions" are the way to make the power of Emacs accessible.
> You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way
I heard a similar argument about vim's billion configuration options.
At some point I simply got tired of having to tweak it and switched to a better editor (not emacs though; both vim and emacs are losing in any debate, but it's a fun debate nonetheless since both camps think software can only be written with these two editors; everyone else must be clueless and skillless).
You met some odd Emacs users. Every Emacs user I have met is a strong proponent of personal computing and crafting tools that work for the individual. It's true that some have a hatred of software that removes users' freedoms but that doesn't mean they think users of freedom-restricting software are skilless.
Spacemacs is kind of bloated and easy to break with custom packages which are not part of original build