> One has to carefully choose and pick the modules...
...And you lost me right there. I am looking for a good experience out of the box. Emacs is not it. I don't want to pick anything, even less so doing it carefully.
I only stuck with Emacs because my life has been hell for a long time and I couldn't muster the energy, time and motivation to look for an alternative. The moment I actually had some of these I immediately jumped ship. (And yeah 20 years is a long time, just be grateful your life doesn't have such a big hole in it.)
> You're salty, perhaps because you couldn't spare enough patience and willpower to learn some Emacs Lisp
I don't want to. I am salty because I had no clue what I was getting involved with.
> You've failed to cultivate some curiosity for basic things like, "what exactly happens when I press a key", open a file, etc.
That's not basic curiosity, that's a chore. If I wanted to do kernel development I would, but I don't. I am a user of these things. I will sooner die than go and be "curious" about them.
I want to get work done.
> You just gave up. No, don't get me wrong.
But I said as much myself, didn't I? Though I'll maintain and still claim that it did waste my time, insofar as not making itself COMPLETELY AND PAINFULLY OBVIOUS. I don't care which "function's definition is void", dude. I care about "can't initialize TreeSitter for Golang, we seem to be missing module X which actually should come pre-installed with your Emacs 29 so WTF man, go ask these doofuses maintaining the Mac Homebrew -- the hell are they doing?!", or some such.
You try not getting me wrong either. I am not a script kiddie. I am a guy who absolutely LOVES programming and is doing it for 30 years but is now sick and tired of constantly having to pamper his tools.
I think it's a fair requirement in 2023 to want to run a few commands, make a bash script that updates the editor + its internally used stuff (packages in Emacs, plugins in VIM) and have a basic guarantee their dev setup won't break after an update.
But alas, no.
And to make it completely fair to all sides -- LunarVim (it is basically an opinionated set of plugins on top of vanilla NeoVim, akin to DOOM for Emacs) suffers the same problems. I figured I'll only update once a month now because the maintainers, like the over-excited kids that they seem to be, figure will break everyone's setup every week because they found this awesome new VIM plugin and the previous one is not "elegant" or whatever, bro.
I really see no way out. Nobody gives a crap about good developer experience, you're expected to be on the treadmill of always pimping your tools until your death apparently.
Almost nobody sees technology as a beast to be tamed and made to do work we don't want to do ourselves; they see it as a dog to play with.
> That's not basic curiosity, that's a chore. If I wanted to do kernel development I would, but I don't. I am a user of these things. I will sooner die than go and be "curious" about them.
If you're a samurai, then sharpening your sword is the single most important non-combatant skill you should master and know how to do by yourself. Sure, you can always hire some peasant who has the skill but shouldn't flabbergast when other samurais laugh at your incompetence.
Knowing your tools and making the best use of them (as a professional) is not part of your job, it is your job. I can still claim to be a carpenter who doesn't use a miter saw because I tried it once and got myself injured. But I can't tell my fellow colleagues to avoid using it and shouldn't complain about how awful those things are. People would laugh at me.
Emacs owes you nothing. It doesn't promise you riches, magical powers or a kingdom in heaven. It's a complex tool, and like any other tool, it requires time, patience and determination to comprehend it. You decided you don't have any of that to spare, so at least have some courage to respect those who made a different choice.
> Nobody gives a crap about good developer experience
The world owes you nothing. Especially, tools like Emacs and Vim. Tools that are absolutely and completely free to get, free to use and free to distribute.
> Almost nobody sees technology as a beast to be tamed and made to do work
That is exactly why I use Emacs. Because I want to feel in control. I am a damn computer programmer, and when the computer doesn't do exactly as I want, yes, I get mad. Emacs gives me a sense of control. You feel differently? Well, then it's you; don't blame Emacs for that.
> If you're a samurai, then sharpening your sword is the single most important non-combatant skill you should master and know how to do by yourself
Framing it as something one-dimensional is not doing your argument any favors. I'll give you a better one: we're virtual samurai with an arsenal of 50 bows, 200 katanas, 150 vakizashis, 20 rifles, 50 armors, 30 horses etc. I choose to not take care of a part of my arsenal because otherwise I'd get no time or motivation to do samurai stuff at all if I did.
There's no need to exaggerate or paint stuff black and white to make your non-existent point feel important.
If you think I am a crappy programmer for not being interested in "What happens when you press a key" then feel free to do so. I'll sleep quite well knowing you believe something so wrong. And you'll never succeed in making me believe like you do. Don't be thin-skinned and accept it.
> Emacs owes you nothing
If you wanted to discuss constructively you would have concluded several comments ago that I had wrong expectations towards Emacs, and that one day I finally understood that, and thus moved away. Which, newsflash, is exactly what happened.
That you and others felt personally attacked and then felt the need to exaggerate and paint me with negative colors (no, I don't "complain") speaks ill of you, not me. I am a pragmatic who finally woke up to the fact that a tool he used for a long time does not match his optimal work and thinking process. Reading anything more into it is just your fantasy.
> don't blame Emacs for that
Only you and a few others in this thread do the "blame" thing. I have expressed my opinion, salted with some negative emotions due to frustration and misalignment of expectations. If you don't like that, well, you'll have to find a way to live through it.
> The world owes you nothing
You're projecting super hard, dude. You over-fixate on an image of a bad programmer that doesn't do X or Y and thus they're "bad", then you figure I am a personification of that image (and it's exactly where you're hilariously wrong), and the rest is as predictable as a ChatGPT prompt; I could have written 90% of your comment if I wanted to argue with myself from another account.
People like you who can't accept different paths to enlightenment exist make for very bad leaders. I hope you're not managing people.
> when the computer doesn't do exactly as I want, yes, I get mad
And I am the same, which makes us arguing all the more funny, absurd and meaningless. Only I choose to do my job for which I am paid, and you choose to do that + tinker with your tools (which I also do but to a lesser extent). Tell me, why does Emacs need tinkering at all? If you are good at it, why haven't you tamed it like 10 years ago, forever? One would think you're bad at Emacs Lisp!
Finally, I tinker with stuff quite a lot -- which seems as something you think I don't do and you take me for some fool who can't write a single algorithm if his life depended on it. And you're wrong. Stop being angry that I don't have the same priorities as you and maybe you'll see a human being and a programmer who gets a lot of stuff done but is sick of pampering his editor programs. Because yes, that's me.
And I just finished writing scripts for migrating Borg backup repositories to Kopia and Restic a day ago because I don't know why... I just love backups. Tinkering. Nothing I got paid to do. I just love it, was curious, did it, was super happy with the result.
> Only you and a few others in this thread do the "blame" thing. I have expressed my opinion, salted with some negative emotions due to frustration and misalignment of expectations.
I had no problem with your opinions, until this passage:
"Emacs seems to be carried by nostalgia from folks that love to tinker with their tools more than they like to actually get any job done."
That was a quite disingenuous statement. A lot of people who made breakthroughs in the industry used Emacs in the past, and some even use it today. I'm sure you didn't mean to say that Donald Knuth, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Guy Stele, Simon Peyton Jones, Rich Hickey, Joe Armstrong, and many, many others "don't care about getting job done", right?
And let me re-iterate once again, your negative emotions are yours only. They are wholly subjective on this matter. Thousands of Emacs users never had the experience you described. And your generalizing statement exacerbated it further. I would've maybe even accepted that there might be just a bit of truth in your opinions, but that angle pushed them all into the corner where they don't reflect true, undeniable facts about Emacs.
I'm not sure what you expected. Coming to a thread on a specific topic, brandishing a faulty generalization about people and asking to be more constructive? Don't you think that's somewhat narcissistic? Well, whatever makes you happy. I should've known better and instead of wasting time with you, I could've done some Emacs tinkering. But unlike you, I wouldn't blame someone else for that. Mea culpa. I own it.
> Thousands of Emacs users never had the experience you described
Which is a shame because that has misled me that Emacs is a trouble-free experience in the past. Wish I was one of those thousands.
> Coming to a thread on a specific topic, brandishing a faulty generalization about people and asking to be more constructive?
For starters, I didn't claim anyone is lacking basic curiosity or implied they are bad programmers, didn't I? Escalating from a point of subjective opinion of someone (me) to these things is still unjustified.
> they don't reflect true, undeniable facts about Emacs.
Another undeniable fact is there are golden paths, and anything outside them is pain. Sad but true. Not only for Emacs but for a lot of software.
Makes me feel super lonely when I write stuff that can parse configs from 3 major versions ago and accounts for partial parsing failures. I know I am not the only one but hell, there aren't many of us out there sadly.
> I should've known better and instead of wasting time with you
You should have known better indeed. If somebody is as jaded as myself, the only way to them is to give them a practical solution that will take them 3 minutes. Everything else is doomed to fail because I tried almost everything else there is and was unhappy with the results.
Next time less preaching, more practical step-by-step articles. ;)
---
Ninja EDIT: just LOL, after 2 weeks of me not starting Emacs but having it run its package updates from the CLI, and now I am greeted with this:
"Symbol's value as variable is void: treesit-language-source-alist"
Seriously. I am only doing what's recommended to do: periodically update packages. And this is the result.
...And you lost me right there. I am looking for a good experience out of the box. Emacs is not it. I don't want to pick anything, even less so doing it carefully.
I only stuck with Emacs because my life has been hell for a long time and I couldn't muster the energy, time and motivation to look for an alternative. The moment I actually had some of these I immediately jumped ship. (And yeah 20 years is a long time, just be grateful your life doesn't have such a big hole in it.)
> You're salty, perhaps because you couldn't spare enough patience and willpower to learn some Emacs Lisp
I don't want to. I am salty because I had no clue what I was getting involved with.
> You've failed to cultivate some curiosity for basic things like, "what exactly happens when I press a key", open a file, etc.
That's not basic curiosity, that's a chore. If I wanted to do kernel development I would, but I don't. I am a user of these things. I will sooner die than go and be "curious" about them.
I want to get work done.
> You just gave up. No, don't get me wrong.
But I said as much myself, didn't I? Though I'll maintain and still claim that it did waste my time, insofar as not making itself COMPLETELY AND PAINFULLY OBVIOUS. I don't care which "function's definition is void", dude. I care about "can't initialize TreeSitter for Golang, we seem to be missing module X which actually should come pre-installed with your Emacs 29 so WTF man, go ask these doofuses maintaining the Mac Homebrew -- the hell are they doing?!", or some such.
You try not getting me wrong either. I am not a script kiddie. I am a guy who absolutely LOVES programming and is doing it for 30 years but is now sick and tired of constantly having to pamper his tools.
I think it's a fair requirement in 2023 to want to run a few commands, make a bash script that updates the editor + its internally used stuff (packages in Emacs, plugins in VIM) and have a basic guarantee their dev setup won't break after an update.
But alas, no.
And to make it completely fair to all sides -- LunarVim (it is basically an opinionated set of plugins on top of vanilla NeoVim, akin to DOOM for Emacs) suffers the same problems. I figured I'll only update once a month now because the maintainers, like the over-excited kids that they seem to be, figure will break everyone's setup every week because they found this awesome new VIM plugin and the previous one is not "elegant" or whatever, bro.
I really see no way out. Nobody gives a crap about good developer experience, you're expected to be on the treadmill of always pimping your tools until your death apparently.
Almost nobody sees technology as a beast to be tamed and made to do work we don't want to do ourselves; they see it as a dog to play with.