< midnight and emacs

Parent

~moonsheep

That's the thing about emacs, it's a very mediocre text editor that comes with a great operating system :p

99% of emacs is knowing your way around elisp, which is just a generic dynamically typed lisp that happens to be very good at plain text processing. It doesn't have good default keybinds because 1) when those keybinds where first chosen keyboards were very different from today (search "space cadet keyboard") and 2) you are not supposed to use the defaults at all, the whole point is that you write your own text editor with the facilities emacs provides you.

You might be thinking: elisp isn't a great language, and if you're going to be writing everything from scratch, you could just as well be writing the entire text editor from scratch with a better language right? Well yes- but then you're going to be missing out on all the things that other people have written. Countless packages on elpa and melpa that do anything and everything you could possibly imagine: magit, lsp-mode, smartparens, yasnippet, and the list goes ever on and on.

You might also be thinking: this all sounds absurdly time-consuming. Why would I go through all this trouble when I could just be using a text editor with sane defaults someone else has written? Well the hard truth is that you will have to invest a lot of time into emacs if you're really willing to use it. Make no mistake, there are a few emacs distributions that come preconfigured with lots of great packages (like spacemacs, doom, frontmacs and a few others) and some people might argue that using them misses the point of emacs entirely.

In summary, use whatever you prefer and best fits your needs. If you're not a fan of having to load 20 megabytes from disk every time you boot up your editor and would rather use vim, then so be it (albeit kakoune is better than vim! ;)

Write a reply