Post #2454779
2026-03-28 13:45 UTC
Replies (3)
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@256k@merveilles.town 2026-03-28 13:49
"Integrated Computing Environment" I really love this concept, extending the IDE concept to the entire computer experience. I'm not so psyched on the acronym however :D
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@csepp@merveilles.town 2026-03-28 16:48
@256k@merveilles.town "Because Emacs is extensible, there is practically no limit to what you can do with it. At least this is the case for all tasks that are text-heavy. Emacs will just gracefully evolve to match your requirements, provided you know how to extend it. The downside, however, is that it is not easy to become proficient in it." I strongly disagree with this. The learning curve is not steep because Emacs is extensible, it's steep because there has not been enough consideration given to beginners. Emacs still ships with defaults that go against every other tool that a user is likely to interact with on a day to day basis. This also extends to core behaviour that isn't just a (setq enable-thing-being-useful t) away, like the cursor not being able to go off-screen, and to the deeper architectural problems, like how async is just not really a thing in Emacs. Some of these would require breaking changes, but they would be worth it. Otherwise VSCode will continue to absolutely fucking dominate the editor landscape and I really wish for that to not be the case, because I don't trust Microsoft. I deeply wish that the Emacs core devs would open VSCode from time to time and see how responsive it is even when editing remote files over a flaky low bandwidth connection, or while searching millions of files in the background. In the past few years an incredible number of extensions came out for VSCode and you can do just about everything in it, so it's definitely not the case that it's hard to extend. Same for Obsidian in the Org competitor niche: it has an extension for everything. So, yeah, Emacs is cool, I'll probably continue to use Doom, because it's better for a keyboard-only workflow, but I'd be damned if I recommend it to my non-programmer friends, or hell, even my programmer colleagues.
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@artsun@merveilles.town 2026-03-28 20:28
@256k@merveilles.town Disclaimer: I'm a happy Emacs user myself (mostly for Org-roam these days). But this part, no no no: "What I can say with confidence is that Emacs is not for tourists. You cannot switch to it with the expectation that you will have a good time right away. No. That will not work. There simply is no shortcut to excellence." This sounds like plain gatekeeping to me, especially with that last sentence that sounds like a cheap slogan. And I strongly disagree with the stance, at least in the way he puts it. It's not because something is hard to do for a beginner that it's *excellence*. Those are two different things. Pure GNU elitism at work here. Edit: I find that this message kind of sounds harsh but was not meant to, thanks for sharing the link as it was an interesting read anyhow :)