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1. Embed this notice
   Divya Ranjan :hilbert: (divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 21:11:30 JST Divya Ranjan :hilbert:

   in reply to

   • Abhinav 🌏
   • Samuel Chase

   @abnv @samebchase I think that's not a fair accusation, GNU Emacs isn't just for developers, nor has it ever touted itself to be that. Zed, Neovim, JetBrains editors, all are able to "sell" themselves because they only target a specific group of people: programmers.

   Emacs on the other hand, is not at all just for programmers. I have been using Emacs since I was only a math teacher. And having the same built-ins that Zed has would've confused me more, because I didn't need them.

   Emacs as free software treats all of its users fairly, and is partial to none of them. Some people want to rely on fancy things, they are provided the ability to have them, some people don't want to do that, and they have that ability as well.

   Emacs makes no assumptions about who you are, instead people make assumptions about Emacs. They always want to use a tiny subset of it and consider that the subset should be at the forefront or core of Emacs. And usually that subset isn't higher than 20% of what Emacs actually has and can offer.

   Most of these programmers who come from Zed, Neovim or god forbid, the VS Code, have no idea about TeXInfo manuals. Do you know GNU Emacs is the best way to read those manuals? It beats the need for opening a browser to look for documentation, and it *certainly* beats `man`.

   Do you know you have excellent GDB integration from Emacs? But most people using GDB would instead open a GTK client or be in the TUI.

   The list would be too long if I continued, the point being, people never go beyond scratching the surface of Emacs. And as such, it doesn't make sense to claim Emacs should be this way or that out of the box. The maintainers who decide on these things know what they're doing.

   • 翠星石 likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Abhinav 🌏 (abnv@fantastic.earth)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 21:11:32 JST Abhinav 🌏

     in reply to

     • Samuel Chase

     @samebchase I disagree again. I don't want to fight the defaults, I don't want to yak shave my editor, and I definitely don't want to debug my editor config. I just want to edit some files, with basic facilities available in most editors these days.

     I don't want to make Emacs my operating system. Just a good basic modern editor would do.

     It took me 20 minutes to set up Zed and I have never since changed its config, I don't even think about it. It comes built-in with many useful plugins and they'll never break because they are maintained by the editor developers. Granted that I cannot read emails in Zed or listen to music, but is it too much to ask for a beginner-friendly out-of-the-box experience?

     Emacs has so much potential to be the best editor ever, maybe it already is, but the steep starting curve will keep driving newbies away.

   • Embed this notice
     Samuel Chase (samebchase@fantastic.earth)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 21:11:33 JST Samuel Chase

     in reply to

     • Abhinav 🌏

     @abnv I agree that the defaults and the keybindings and the initial experience are unhelpful/bad/jarring/surprising for a newbie. In the initial days it's better to not fight it, and to go with the idiosyncrasies ("M-w" to copy stuff and not the usual Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V copy-paste), and with no expectation of a conventional/familiar experience. It is 50+ years old after all.

     As you begin to use it despite these quirks it soon becomes clear that it is extremely and infinitely customizable. You can then begin to accept less and less of its quirks, and gradually (yak) shave away those parts.

     Soon enough, you'll find something entirely tailored to how you operate and what you expect. It takes time.

     The problem about opinionated defaults, is that it someday those extra packages will surely break or refuse to do what you need them to. That will be a lot harder to debug than incrementally building up a configuration that you deeply understand.

   • Embed this notice
     Abhinav 🌏 (abnv@fantastic.earth)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 21:11:34 JST Abhinav 🌏

     in reply to

     • Samuel Chase

     @samebchase I disagree with you there. I just tried it out. Installed emacs and ran it from a project directory. It showed me some things about itself. Where are my files? Most editors would show you a tree of files by default on start.

     I happened to know that I can invoke commands in Emacs with Alt-X, so I presssed that. Searched for "Open file" command ... found nothing. After some typing around, I found the find-file command and used that to open a file. And it opened with almost no editing support. No syntax highlighting, no auto completion. At this point most editors would recommend installing appropriate plugins, and start them with sane defaults to provide good editing support automatically. Emacs does nothing.

     Then I went and searched online, and found these configs hundreds of lines long, written in a language I have no idea about. That's when I closed the Emacs window.

     Emacs needs better defaults, and more user friendly bundling.

   • Embed this notice
     Samuel Chase (samebchase@fantastic.earth)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 21:11:36 JST Samuel Chase

     in reply to

     • Abhinav 🌏

     @abnv I would strongly recommend against using a pre-packaged setup.

     1. You can get a lot of mileage with default emacs. It's perfectly usable as a text editor from day 1.
     2. Explore use-package and install a handful of packages you need, maybe haskell-mode, magit etc.
     3. Try out org mode, maybe try using it to drive your day as a todo list.
     4. Someday, you'll need to do X. Check if there's an emacs package for X, and see if that makes anything smoother for you. e.g. I needed to write a short script (as in a skit), and I found fountain-mode which turned out to make the process enjoyable.
     5. You'll need to write yourself a small function to save you some time.
     6. Finally, you may release an emacs package for others to use.

     I am at 5. I hope to hit 6 someday.

     Someone with a 50 piece drum-kit, is not automatically superior than a djembe or tabla player. The whole point is to make music.

   • Embed this notice
     Abhinav 🌏 (abnv@fantastic.earth)'s status on Friday, 30-May-2025 21:11:37 JST Abhinav 🌏

     I used #Emacs for a short while a decade ago. I want to get back into using it, but now I'm really intimidated by amount of configuration it needs. Is there an Emacs setup that works similar to other modern #editors with minimal configuration, and looks good? #AskFedi