Here’s the final two lines:
> We should know better than to prematurely optimize for order when all of all time arrowpoints in and down to the absolute return 0. Words of wisdom, let it be: your world is a fine stream of consciousness, lacking only a decent editor.
If that feels like your jam, go for it, but personally I feel in need of an exorcist after letting my computer load this…
Ultimately such storytelling seems to be the best means that we as humans have to convey our subjective experiences, which purely objective descriptions are not very good at. (This is one of the weak points of the engineering mindset that I was criticizing in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45650941.) So I sympathize with the project. But I wonder if it may end up preaching to the choir a bit: if you remember the intoxication of reading Barlow's Declaration of Independence, probably you already have a settled relationship with Emacs, whether intimate or traumatic, or both?
Emacs, too, is bigger on the inside.
This is a robust and comprehensive antidote to nihilism and anyone who has ever missed the internet of the nineties or early 00s as I have would be doing themselves an enormous favour by reading it, and then rereading it as I intend to.
It lost me for a moment at Implicity and I was worried the spell had be broken but the profound blows didn't stop.
Your words, not mine. But gene propagation is up there, and steady wages is a sufficient if not necessary condition for that to happen.
In fact, in was the opposite.
So what are you even talking about?
When I open Emacs, it's like I'm five years old again, seated at my VIC-20, confronted with the infinite possibilities of the machine, challenged to explore them. Except the possibilities are so much greater because computers can do so much more and Emacs—as the programmable way to program—puts them virtually all at my fingertips. It's all a bit overwhelming, and this essay does a good job of capturing that overwhelm and the shift in perspective needed to cope.
That said, it's likely to send most people screaming back whence they came, clinging ever more firmly to their Visual Studio Codes and IntelliJs, if they be programmers at all and if not, it may turn them off programming altogether. Because that perspective shift looks like utter madness from the outside. I don't think we as a species are ready for computers yet. The possibilities, the implications.
They say there’s no Emacs — only your Emacs.
My take personal takeaways from the experience:
1) capslock/ctrl switching is helpful in so many other areas - so I kept that
2) emacs is something you want to "live in" (e.g. learning to rely on eshell) if you want to really become proficient with it
3) emacs is something you have to be willing to tweak/adjust via elisp to suite your personal preferences if you want to really really really be proficient with it
I didn't hate emacs but it also wasn't for me.
Or vterm if you don't want to be proficient with eshell.
Emacs w/org mode was the only program that helped me make sense of the mess and finish the darn thing. I have never seen a program so elegant and yet so powerful, and I am forever grateful it exists if only as a counterweight to the modern tech paradigm.
billfruit•8h ago
Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.
If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.
internet_points•8h ago
They could at least change the default theme to one of the already-bundled modus-themes or something.
billfruit•8h ago
Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.
worthless-trash•7h ago
internet_points•7h ago
binary132•2h ago
teddyh•8h ago
positron26•7h ago
mickeyp•6h ago
pjmlp•4h ago
There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.
positron26•7h ago
The reason there aren't programmers targeting the large market is a tangent into why I'm building PrizeForge, but the answer now doesn't change.
mickeyp•6h ago
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Gr...
You can change the exec-path to point to your cross compiled grep tool --- or you can change the command string to your tool of choice.
skydhash•5h ago
- result on standard output - path and line numbers on each line
A lot of emacs reliance on other tools follow the same pattern. While the default is posix, it has enough options to twist it to fit whatever OS.
internet_points•4h ago
pooyamo•42m ago
kqr•5h ago
skydhash•5h ago
- have result that can be formatted in a tabular fashion
- do stuff with files then present some diagnostics (especially if errors and warnings are related to the files)
- Have an REPL interface
It’s not preconfigured like VS Code, but it’s much more versatile. Cursor having to fork VSCode is one such example. In Emacs, anything is just another package.
pjmlp•4h ago
IDEs with such capabilities were already available in the 1990's.
I became an XEmacs user in the 1990's, because there was hardly anything better in UNIX systems.
Remember, Emacs still lacked many niceties only available on XEmacs, and vim was yet to be invented.
This is how old such IDE features have been available.
bitwize•2h ago
pjmlp•2h ago
Thanks to its origin, XEmacs also had for several years many graphical capabilities, that if I am not mistaken only landed on main Emacs during the late 2000's, by then I was back into IDE land.
kragen•4h ago
Apparently I've sometimes improvised an equivalent: "Run grep via find, with user-specified args COMMAND-ARGS. ... This command uses a special history list for its arguments, so you can easily repeat a find command."
My out-of-the-box autocomplete is M-/, which works in environments where LSP doesn't, like writing English. It works sort of poorly in all of them, but I write production code slowly enough that my typing speed isn't close to being a bottleneck. It's more of a bottleneck when writing English, but even there, generally any of my good writing was good rewriting.
Where I've found LSP-like functionality really useful in the past in IDEA and later Eclipse was not autocomplete, which is mostly an annoyance, but in automated refactoring (extract variable, extract method, inline method) and in rapidly iterating through the implementors of a method whose semantics I'm changing.
PaulDavisThe1st•2h ago
Ardour has around 800k lines of code, and ag (not even the fastest of the new greps) can search it all more or less faster than I can type.
The idea of some system that analyzes/caches/indexes the code just isn't necessary anymore.
kragen•1h ago
Somehow I never twigged that you wrote Ardour and JACK. Thanks for JACK! (My audio editing needs are very modest and so I haven't actually tried Ardour.)
ubermonkey•4h ago
...you are a second class citizen in the emacs republic.
I mean, I don't endorse this position, but it's the way things are.
DonHopkins•4h ago
...you are a third class citizen in the emacs republic.
In spite of the fact that you can't spell emacs without mac.
Also:
>If you install emacs for linux...
...you get flamed for not calling it gnu/linux.
slowmovintarget•3h ago
That build has native compilation, and if you go for a Doom install you may need to build ripgrep yourself, but... that's also not difficult.
jpfromlondon•2h ago
pton_xd•4h ago
There are plenty of emacs "starter kits" that do aim to provide more of a batteries included experience. My favorite is doom, it's worth checking out and does setup all the features you mention.
Pointing new users at those more advanced default configs as an option would be pretty helpful, I think.
billfruit•2h ago
binary132•2h ago
soupy-soup•3h ago
The only one I've ran into that is different is Java, but considering how underdeveloped Java LSP servers are, you probably don't want to be using emacs for Java development.
binary132•2h ago