Even more batteries included with Emacs

You're probably thinking of kill ring, which I always thought was a neat term.

Nothing's wrong with it. It's just incomparable categorically. Just like you can't really equate a photo-editor and the web-browser. Sure, there's a way to do photo editing in the browser, still will be weird to compare them.

> Neovim has been much better

In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

> I just want a good text editor

Is that implying Emacs doesn't have "a good one"? You probably just have not discovered some mind-blowing features of the editor. It is hands down the best-known machine ever designed to deal with plain text, nothing even comes close. Indirect buffers alone are such a brilliant idea, I have zero clue how people ever exposed to that power would willingly abandon it. I get it though, building a text-manipulating theater orchestrated by Lisp is not for everyone. Unfortunately, most newcomers get attracted to Emacs hearing "how powerful an editor it is", without ever learning what exactly makes it as such.

A common reason for breakage is/was:

  - Neovim changes some API (deprecating, ...).
  - User upgrades Neovim and theres some incompability, OR user upgrade plugin and that plugin assumes a much newer version of Neovim. (I've often seen Neovim plugins "mandate" either the latest stable Neovim or even HEAD).

  1. Neovim has been including some popular plugins (or at least their functionality domain) in the past few years. This obviates the need for plugin-for-$THING, and reduces breakage.
  2. ISTM that the pace of (new) plugin development in the Neovim-sphere has slowed down.

I can remember removing vim-commentary (from tpope) a while ago because Neovim included something like it in the main distribution. Granted, that specific plugin never broke because it uses the stable viml API.

No such thing exist in neovim (or at least in times when I was using it), so that churn never ends. Also I find, that neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner - folke often takes time off and half the packages one uses stands still.

But in the end, while I like neovim, I also find that emacs ecosystem has better ideas - which-key, embark do not stop to amuse me (I will not comment on whether it is a good thing for a text editor). I also do not like lua and actively dislike the experience of debugging and configuring neovim with it (maybe less of an issue with LLM these days).

In my experience, running in a terminal absolutely adds a bunch of rendering/performance issues and all kind of surprising failures with hotkeys.

I used it more than I use emacs, but I agree with the assessment of doom emacs vs neovim.

It’s a bit sad Neovim has stolen the thunder from the original work of Moolenaar & co. My guess is that neovim will splinter itself down the line further again once lua stops being attractive, while vim & Emacs will keep chugging along for another half century.

It's like a willful exercise in ignoring systems thinking. With Emacs every package tends to be designed with Emacs itself in mind, packages like consult, vertico, marginalia etc all built on Emacs' facilities improving not just the package itself but the overall experience of using Emacs, intentionally so.

The Neovim ecosystem is a bit like a dozen architects each designing a room in a house with total disregard for the layout of the house. A very common experience I had, and I never even used many plugins, was that when something was updated often something else would break. An update in the completion engine would cause some weird quirk with the lsp backend, etc.

Respect where it's due to folke, he's been pushing the neovim ecosystem forward incredibly fast. The bleeding edge just ain't everyone's style though.

Seems worth a look, simply because it’s from the magit author.

You just cannot compare software robustness to human lifespan. Does software need 3 years at the bare minimum to be self-sufficient? Does it become argumentative and crashes a lot after 13-14 years?

Let's reword this a bit: "I wish Lisp use was more popular with LLMs...", because using Lisp REPL with AI is such a "life hack", I don't get why more people don't do that. When you give AI a "true Lisp REPL" it works wondrously - it stops randomly guessing and starts empirically understanding the problem and the code - saving time, tokens, your mental energy. And with Emacs' text manipulating machinery on top of that, things can get seriously interesting.

The way it works:

1. You start emacs in daemon (server) mode.

2. You prompt claude to instantiate an emacs client and write/run tests.

That's it.

Claude will then "pilot" an emacs instance where you can visibly see it running tests. Since almost everything is a first-class function in emacs, and emacs enables almost complete introspection, claude can debug the code in the execution environment. You can also just look at the piloted emacs instance and prompt the agent on what's wrong in the running application state.

This is much more thorough then just having claude write unit tests because many of the issues you might encounter are visual/gui things - which, again, because emacs allows so much introspection, can be examined by looking at the current application state.

This is a good example of "completing the loop."

I don't need Anthropic to break my emacs, I can do that all by myself.

    C-u 0 M-x asi-optimize-everything 

Use `C-h k` and then middle click on the ruler-mode’s header to find out what command is bound to the middle mouse button, then bind that same command to a different mouse button:

    (keymap-set ruler-mode-map "<header-line> <down-mouse-3>" #'ruler-mode-mouse-grab-any-column)

Aha! That's what's been missing in my life! Thank you.

I tried using it maybe a decade ago and back then it had a tendency to mess up window layouts and leave weird buffers around. I notice there's now a GitHub repository which has two spurts of work in its history that probably didn't exist when I last used it – have they improved its usability?

But I agree that it is very stable and for me also doesn't break, even though I use use-package a lot and install many key packages. Maybe it is important to note, that I don't need everything there is out there and that I remove not well working packages quickly after trying them. From time to time I also look at my init file and get rid of no longer used stuff.

I've been using emacs every day all day every time I'm front of a computer, since 1991. I need only one finger to count the pieces of software I've been using that long that have never crashed or broken on me in any way.

I have also run into compatibility issues when using older versions of Emacs with newer packages, and newer Emacs versions with older packages.

[1]: I totally did not build my blog on top of a bunch of these quirks. Every time one of them is fixed I'm reminded of the workflow xkcd. https://m.xkcd.com/1172/

I think most of that was because I didn’t understand emacs itself very well, and doom or whatever is an entire extra layer of code and idioms on top of that. Start adding in any custom packages you’ve installed and things get well outside of the realm where a beginner can comprehend them.

Like you, I also now have a pretty large number of packages, and rarely run into issues on update, with any issues that do occur being easy enough to fix. However, I think a lot of that comes from at this point having built my own emacs from the ground up, so I understand what all the components are doing, mostly…

There was a "community" about a decade or two ago. On Freenode IRC, there were regulars who hung around in #emacs and it was quite nice. There were no corporate sponsors or random startups trying to hire from there so it was genuinely just a bunch of people who enjoyed using Emacs and were chatting about it. It's a part of the reason I got really hooked into it. I still use Org heavily for meeting minutes etc.

No, about ten underemployed or semi-retired graybeards on the emacs.devel mailing list burn most of their waking hours futzing with emacs. That's not an exaggeration. They receive no remuneration.

No, it's the same issue. In a Linux shell (say, bash or fish) ctrl-c is not "copy" but "terminate program". Most emacs editing keys (copy-paste, motion) work in the shell as they do in emacs, at least in fish and bash (and probably other places in Linux).

People holding your attitude is one thing that keeps people away from Emacs. Very few people want to get into the weeds of customizing their editor. They want to do whatever it is they are interested in and the editor is tool to get it done. Doom Emacs, and other approachable "distributions" are the way to make the power of Emacs accessible.

I heard a similar argument about vim's billion configuration options.

At some point I simply got tired of having to tweak it and switched to a better editor (not emacs though; both vim and emacs are losing in any debate, but it's a fun debate nonetheless since both camps think software can only be written with these two editors; everyone else must be clueless and skillless).

[1] and they do break!