Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 2, 2021 17:47 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Emacs discusses web-based development workflows by karim
Parent article: Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Understood.. that is how I have been using emacs. It is hard coded into my brain too much to find most other editors 'useful' to me, but I really 'hate' programming much in it. And yes emacs will probably last for more years in a slowly decaying state. However as all of us 1990's people reach our own 60's.. at some point the 30 year olds running the distros in 10 years or so will say 'why?' and tell us to use something they can support.. [sort of like we did in the 1990's to the people who had editors written in Algol68 or Fortran IV]

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 2, 2021 17:52 UTC (Thu) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link]

We're on the same page.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 6:49 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

As a vim user who has never seriously touched Emacs... my 2¢ is that the language you program your editor in *should* suck (e.g. VimL is an awful language to program in). It discourages you from trying to do anything too ridiculous instead of running a separate program. vim is a tool I start when I want to edit a file. If I want to do something else, I run an appropriate command or write code in a language which is actually reasonable (usually zsh or Python). If I want to modify the contents of a buffer, I use vim's built-in filtering support (see https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#filter) and do all the hard parts outside of vim. If for some godforsaken reason I actually want IDE-like functionality, I (grumble and) fire up an IDE. But that is rare in my experience, possibly because SREs are doing a lot of systems orchestration and not a lot of "look at my gigantic Java monstrosity with 50k classes."

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 12:58 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

To be honest, vim is so much closer to emacs that comparing them is more about which keys I press to get to an end of a line versus anything else. [Heck turn on all the bells and whistles and vim will out memory use than 'Eighty Megs And Constantly Swapping' (EMACS)]. But in the end, I have seen more Linux people (from 60 year olds to 20 year olds) use vscode than emacs or vi in the last several years to edit everything from conf files to coding new things. I would not have ever expected that 30 years ago.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:36 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> But in the end, I have seen more Linux people (from 60 year olds to 20 year olds) use vscode than emacs or vi in the last several years to edit everything from conf files to coding new things. I would not have ever expected that 30 years ago.

Because by any objective standard, VSCode is really good! It provides a very nice comprehensive, integrated, highly-customizable environment for what a substantial (possibly even a majority) of software developers these days are working on.

VSCode is the all-dancing everything that emacs was once derided for, with the significant advantage that it is implemented in a language that has a substantial developer mindshare (javascript) vs something that was a niche even in its heydey (ie lisp).

But making something so well integrated and polished takes a _lot_ of work. It's probably fair to say that between Google (ie the Chrome/Electron underpinnings) and Microsoft, more money has been invested into VS Code in the past 6 months than emacs has seen in four decades. Heck, the office supply budget for the VS Code team is probably larger than the FSF's annual spend.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 14:41 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Try this: go to Github, click on any source file and press '.' (dot). This is Microsoft integrating its product, Emacs can't possibly beat that.