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.
I used it more than I use emacs, but I agree with the assessment of doom emacs vs neovim.
Neovim seems fairly reasonable. Using the LazyVim distribution of Neovim and it works quite well for my purposes.
> 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.
Do not underestimate wisdom as a cognitive skill, even if in today's world we tend to discredit it because of agism.
That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.
Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is not an IDE. Emacs is a platform to develop your own tooling. Text is the main interface Emacs offers.
I don't speak for the Emacs community, there isn't even such a thing except maybe semi related groups that share viewpoints, usage and interests. But on the whole, I don't think the "Emacs community" is looking for users or is looking to attract users. At least not users who are looking for "text editor experiences" that mimic or take inspiration from VS Code and the likes.
The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.
I'm not sure it does. Emacs has a healthy user base of people like you and I and appears to receive stable funding from the FSF. I don't see that changing any time soon. Emacs can be Emacs and be just fine the way it is.
I will keep suggesting new users should aim to get as close to vanilla as they have patience for, because that will teach them more about the powerful virtual machine running their text editor, and the ways it can be bent to do their bidding.
DIRED on ITS is also similar enough to today’s DIRED.
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?
Only once was there a noticeable breakage when a command like `git log` in the terminal would spit out all its output instead of displaying one screenful at a time. I'd expect someone following stable releases wouldn't experience any breakages.
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/
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.
> 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...
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).
