| > First we had console editors, [...] Then we had full IDEs [...] Now the trend is toward "enhanced text editors" (VSC/Atom/ST): editors that can have modular plugin functionality and interact with the console so you don't lose any of its versatility. They're usually faster and more lightweight than IDEs but keep most of what you need Emacs has functioned as an "advanced text editor" for at least 20 years and probably longer. There's a very common misconception that Emacs is a "console editor", but the reality is that when you first launch it in a windowed environment you get something that looks an awful lot like Sublime, VSCode & Atom: a text editor window with a menubar and toolbar similar (yes, it's not perfect!) to what you'd expect from any other editor native to your chosen platform. The time investment involved in learning how to use it is also considerably less than implied elsewhere in this thread. In fact I really doubt that it's significantly more than you'd have to spend educating yourself about any other "advanced editor"'s configuration, keybindings for non-obvious actions, extension mechanism, etc. It's easy enough to learn the (admittedly unconventional) keybindings for a handful of common things like opening and saving files when you have the menus to refer to, and by default it'll even open a buffer containing clickable hyperlinks to helpful things like tutorials. I still haven't seen an editor or IDE with better built-in help. Even configuring Emacs isn't all that hard: there's a built-in interface for installing packages, most of which will pretty-much auto-activate once installed (i.e. less need to mess around with elisp), and for changing configuration there's "customize", which is a nicer way to change configuration variables than just editing a JSON file. When you do have to start writing some elisp code (you'll almost certainly have to write a little) the documentation is superb and there are more than enough resources on the web to help you. A programmer who is already familiar with a dynamic language like JS will probably have less trouble learning elisp than a C programmer did 20 years ago. None of which is to say that there aren't areas where Emacs isn't behind. I'd like to see better support for projects, snippets and auto-completion out of the box, as well as being more nicely pre-configured for popular languages like JavaScript and Python. Emacs 24 is four years old at this point, and that's a very long time for any developer tool to stay still. These days I'd say the most confusing thing about Emacs is working out which of the many competing packages you should choose for whatever it is you're trying to do. Age is working against it here, because what was the almost-universally-recommended package five years ago - for which you'll get plenty of helpful google search results - has often been superceded by something better. But with a handful of plugins installed (yasnippet, helm, projectile, auto-complete) it's (IMO of course) still the best editor out there. |