Post #2670785

2026-03-28 16:48 UTC

@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.

Replies (1)

@256k@merveilles.town 2026-03-28 20:05

@csepp@merveilles.town I still use vscode daily for work because I work with front end frameworks and typescript and JavaScript build tools and it requires a lot of peripherals like eslint, prettier, tsc, multiple LSPs running, multi syntax highlighting trees…etc etc. Emacs is an absolute slog for all of that even if some of that functionality is becoming built in its faaaar from being reliable sadly. I don’t like microslop either but for my work our entire thing is running through Microsoft enterprise account so might as well use vscode. For my personal projects I’ll always tend to reach for emacs or sometimes neovim (although ever since finding eMacs my vim days have come to an end) Vscode as shitty as it is for many reasons, is also the most reliably well functioning out of the box and has the biggest community support so it’s hard to argue against it. I was a big ATOM fan before MS bought GitHub and subsequently killed atom and GitHub as we knew it. I’ve tried zed from the person behind atom written in rust and it’s quite nice! Though it’s still got a long way to go for extensibility. At least it’s not a total memory monster like vscode. I truly wish there was a new eMacs that broke off from the legacy that puts multithreading, async and a better modern UI as first priorities even if I do hate the idea of breaking one of the longest backwards compatible pieces of software. Something like a neomacs of some sort, but given the current state of the world I feel like if that were to happen it would most likely just be some vibe coded slop garbage like everything else has become.

Open ##2670786