All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix.
Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.
The irony is that the vim camp can use just the same "argument" here about emacs. So that is a weird comparison to want to make here.
> The editor is older than most devs after all.
Well, being old does not automatically mean better. Peak human physical performance typically happens, with some exceptions (Justin Gatlin, if we ignore the use of enhancement drugs) in younger years; see Usain Bolt's fastest time achieved when he was young (23 years, in 2009). For mental tasks it is not so limited, but for physical peaks it is often in the younger years. For some software projects it also is the case that older age means more code, which in turn automatically mean smore bugs, all other things being equal. I am not necessarily questioning as to whether emacs has more bugs; my point is that the comparison/analogy does not work as means of quality assessment.
I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.
I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.
My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024.
> This is largely a discoverability problem
In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!)
Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...
Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect something to break if your configuration isn’t.
> You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way
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).
All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix.
I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg
Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.
The irony is that the vim camp can use just the same "argument" here about emacs. So that is a weird comparison to want to make here.
> The editor is older than most devs after all.
Well, being old does not automatically mean better. Peak human physical performance typically happens, with some exceptions (Justin Gatlin, if we ignore the use of enhancement drugs) in younger years; see Usain Bolt's fastest time achieved when he was young (23 years, in 2009). For mental tasks it is not so limited, but for physical peaks it is often in the younger years. For some software projects it also is the case that older age means more code, which in turn automatically mean smore bugs, all other things being equal. I am not necessarily questioning as to whether emacs has more bugs; my point is that the comparison/analogy does not work as means of quality assessment.
Nice write up about Emacs, ruler-mode is a thing I never used before.
Recently I finally start to C-X M-x to do text scaling, the typing is hard even as near 2 decades user of Emacs.
I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.
Try it out! It has its own learning curve, but it's convenient to use in quick and dirty situations.
I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.
I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.
My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024.
> This is largely a discoverability problem
In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!)
Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...
Spacemacs is kind of bloated and easy to break with custom packages which are not part of original build
Both you and the sibling common by buzzwords have the same contexte: You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way. Most package assumes something standard and you can expect something to break if your configuration isn’t.
> You’re both using someone’s configuration framework, which goes bery much against the vanilla emacs’s way
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).
Emacs is a great OS. If you complement it with vim then you may have a working editor as well, provided you know how to exit from vim.