Since I graduated, I've had people try to sell me on the following editors, which were going to be the future: BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, Komodo Edit, NetBeans, and Eclipse.
Each was going to kill Emacs.
Somehow, I think I'll be using a version of Emacs until the day I can no longer type.
Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting months getting up to speed on the latest and greatest thing every 8 years or so.
This adds up over a career.
Oh, and by the by, this was written in Emacs using GhostText as the link between Firefox and Emacs.
>Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting months getting up to speed on the latest and greatest thing every 8 years or so.
Yeah I used to think this way, because you're right: becoming proficient in emacs takes significant effort and time.
But becoming proficient in VS code takes maybe 25 minutes. 25 minutes to change IDEs every 8 years or so doesn't seem like an onerous requirement to me.
Emacs just has extremely poor defaults and out of box UX.
>But becoming proficient in VS code takes maybe 25 minutes.
Becoming proficient in kicking a ball takes 5 minutes. Becoming proficient in football takes slightly longer. Magit alone makes VS Code look like a child's finger painting.
>Magit alone makes VS Code look like a child's finger painting.
Magit is indeed a great git client, but I don't see what that has to do with emacs having bad defaults and an out of box experience that could be charitably described as antique.
>You'll understand in 20 years when you're on your 4th IDE which will change the world^tm.
How condescending.
But no, I probably won't mind changing editors every few years because I am capable of learning new things and do not require a safe space to keep me insulated from the outside world.
An editor is the least interesting thing to learn in computer engineering. If you enjoy wasting your time may I suggest something like stamp collecting that doesn't create billions of dollars of lost productivity for the rest of us?
Plus I’m changing editors every 8 or 4 years because the “new one” is better in some regard. VSCode is a very good editor. Sublime was a good editor too, but VSCode was better enough to make me switch. Whatever comes after VSCode will be that much better!
So there is nothing wrong at all with switching to a new editor… it just means things are getting even better!!!
Bad defaults for who? Emacs userbase is quite heterogeneous, not everyone is a swdev, not everyone is young. All it takes to have great defaults is maybe ten instructions in init.el.
So true! Now don't get me wrong, I quite like VS Code as it's so easy to set up and there is a plugin for almost anything, but I find myself always coming back to Emacs.
He's right about the defaults though. Use something like Spacemacs or Doom if you just want to dip your toes in the goodness that is Emacs.
I typed up some thoughts about the nth time I tried out Visual Studio Code to see what all the fuss was about and if my productivity could be improved vs. Emacs. I might turn it into a blog post, if I can be arsed to start a blog again.
One header read: "Not better enough". Inasmuch as Visual Studio Code does anything better than Emacs, it doesn't do things better enough to justify expending the high activation energy of switching, unlearning my Emacs workflow and learning all that I need to know to do things Visual Studio Code's way.
I honestly believe emacs UX to be fairly superior. I watch my colleagues struggle to find open files among tens of open tabs in vs code every day. Or endlessly navigating on the filesystem tree with the side bar before finding what they need.
Things that take half a second in emacs take minutes for them. And the UI is so cluttered.
Each was going to kill Emacs.
Somehow, I think I'll be using a version of Emacs until the day I can no longer type.
Meanwhile, everyone else is wasting months getting up to speed on the latest and greatest thing every 8 years or so.
This adds up over a career.
Oh, and by the by, this was written in Emacs using GhostText as the link between Firefox and Emacs.