Someone on reddit shared his emacs config, I don't know how I should feel about as it has more than 5k lines. He must be either one of those 10x developers, if they exist at all, or someone who just grow into it. But I don't think it is that useful as it is supposed to be. If your init.el files has 5k lines, you must be doing something wrong imho.

🧶 betabube

2023-08-21 · 9 months ago

12 Comments ↓

🕹️ skyjake [...] · 2023-08-21 at 12:25:

It's a double-edged sword to have an editor (or more accurately, an environment) so customizable and extensible. On one hand, if you invest hours and hours into setting up everything just right, you get a system that works great for your needs. But then you're locked in. What if your needs change? You're practically forced into spending more hours into updating and maintaining the configuration/scripts. During that time, the world has moved on and maybe a simpler, better solution has already emerged that would also work great for you.

Tinkering with Emacs could of course be also seen as a nice hobby. 🙂

🤖 alexlehm · 2023-08-21 at 12:41:

i am pretty sure they use only a little bit of it

😺 gemalaya · 2023-08-21 at 12:59:

people who use emacs are insane

🚀 stack · 2023-08-21 at 13:52:

Someone said that Emacs is an OS that could use a good editor. But with built in Lisp, you can customize it to do any task, or write a browser... so it's not that ridiculous. My config started as a few lines, and grew to a few hundred as I added stuff and colors I liked...

🤖 alexlehm · 2023-08-21 at 14:58:

The old joke was (in the 90s), the reason by the GNU OS is not finished is that they want to boot into Emacs and then run their OS and they do not have a computer that is fast enough to run it

🦀 jeang3nie · 2023-08-21 at 16:20:

I'm a Vim guy, NeoVim actually, but we have the same sort of guys ricing their configs to hell and back. I like to keep regular vi around and use that when I'm not in a full programming session. Keeping in touch with how it behaves out of the box helps when you have to jump onto another machine. You could probably do the same with uemacs?

👽 TKurtBond · 2023-08-21 at 18:43:

Heh. My current emacs configuration files run to 7015 lines right now., and still includes a little code from my first .emacs, which I created when first used emacs on VAX/VMS back in the mid to late 1980s. I don't find it a problem to maintain, but each piece was was written as it was needed. Some of it is probably obsolete, but I've never gone back and trimmed it down.

🚀 stack · 2023-08-21 at 19:37:

In the end I use maybe a dozen keybindings in Emacs and about the same in vim... I know there are better ways to do things, but don't bother looking them up except for extreme cases...

👻 mediocregopher [...] · 2023-08-21 at 21:37:

Like jeang3nie I keep my vim config pretty slim, mostly nerdtree and some language specific plugins. I'm sure there are those who are equally frugal in emacs. I don't think it's a quality of the editor, but the programmer. Some people like to chase perfection.

🍩 wholesomedonut · 2023-08-22 at 00:22:

I've tried using vi/m, neovim, or emacs as daily drivers. It's never really stuck for me. I prefer VSCode or even just notepad++ for most things.

😺 gemalaya · 2023-08-24 at 20:07:

My .vimrc is ~170 lines and i haven't changed it in years

👽 TKurtBond · 2023-09-26 at 12:29:

As someone whose emacs config is over 8000 lines long, I can say it just grew over time.

— TKB's Emacs Lisp config file.

I add new things when I need them, and emacs makes a vey production environment for developing things in emacs lisp.