[xroche]

> The first time you load many common filetypes (like Java for example), a box pops up saying "Do you want me to install a nice set of standard Java plugins?"

This. Used Emacs for fifteen years professionally, and I gave up when I had to reinstall my laptop, as having intellisense-like features and easy navigation in Emacs is a complete pain.

I actually did not intent to switch to VSCode, but after a couple of hours of scratching my head with list configuration files, I ended up "trying" VSCode, and after a couple of _minutes_, everything was working (completion, navigation etc.)

After a couple of tweaking, clangd was plugged, and I had direct visual compiler feedback in realtime while typing code in the window.

VSCode is not "better". It's just another world.

[NoGravitas]

I've used Emacs for 30 years, and I have no intention of ever giving it up, but IMO this is somewhat accurate. The package installation and configuration story on Emacs has gotten a lot better over the last ten years or so, but there really ought to be a kind of meta package installer and configurator that does exactly what VSCode does: when it finds a file that it doesn't handle specially but for which there is an existing package or set of packages, install those packages and configure them with reasonable defaults.

Spacemacs does this, which is the main nice thing about it. Unfortunately, it also carries a lot of other baggage rather than just doing this.

[brabel]

Emacs Prelude[1] does exactly that.

It comes with very few extra packages installed, but when you try to open a file in a certain language, it will offer to install a set of "standard" packages for you that enable support for it.

[1] https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/

[AzzieElbab]

- I've used Emacs for 30 years, and I have no intention of ever giving it up - why? I hear it is much easier to quit then vim :)

[vidarh]

I gave up emacs by writing my own editor... I realised I could write one in fewer lines than my emacs config...

[NoGravitas]

I have noticed that on average, I throw out my emacs config and start from scratch every ten years or so.

[globular-toast]

My emacs setup takes minutes to install on a new computer. I use borg, but there are many other ways to do it.

[mr337]

I was thinking the same thing. I use spacemacs and have moved to about 5 laptops over the last five years. Just bring along the .spacemacs files and any supporting tools like ripgrep etc and I am up and running.

[oblio]

How long did it take you to assemble your setup?

Wall time, not fuzzy memories à la "it takes 5 minutes to cook this".

My bet? Tens, if not hundreds of hours.

[Jtsummers]

I've probably spent less than 50 hours total over 20 years on my emacs configuration. But it wasn't all at once. And now I just copy the .emacs file between systems. Tweaking it is maybe minutes a year now. If I want to do something with, say, Go, I just download the appropriate mode. The longest time spent was when I had a few bespoke languages at work that had no text editor support in any editor. I wrote some minor modes to support them, that was probably 10 hours total with most of the time on the first minor mode, and the rest flowing quickly thanks to the prior experience.

EDIT: For comparison, I've probably spent 100x that (if not more) on Linux configurations.

[globular-toast]

Countless hours. How long do you think a carpenter spent learning and developing t his tool kit?

[oblio]

I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc.

And there isn't enough time in the world to become as proficient as I'd like for those, let alone if I'd waste time to optimize tools to get 99.999% efficiency with them.

At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is sharp enough.

[globular-toast]

> I don't know about you, but my toolkit, which I'm perfecting, is programming language paradigms, design patterns, algorithms, programming language SDKs, popular libraries and frameworks, etc.

Well that's great but none of that gets anything done. You need to be able to write programs effectively.

> At some point your hammer is good enough and your saw is sharp enough.

Yeah. I don't regularly invest many hours into emacs. You asked how many hours went into it. Over the past 15 years it's countless hours. Over the past year, not many at all.

[oblio]

> Well that's great but none of that gets anything done. You need to be able to write programs effectively.

:-)) Of course it does. Most of my time isn't spent in actually writing the programs. It's in reading and understanding what they do, how to best modify them, debugging issues, etc.

I'd guess I spend about 10% of my time, at most, actually editing characters.

[donio]

Not the OP but yeah, it's definitely up there for me.

BUT the big difference is that the decades old portions of my .emacs are still very relevant and in use every day while basically all the work I've sunk into configuring some long forgotten GUI junk has rotted away long ago and has to be redone over and over again.

We all spend an enormous amount of time tinkering with things but unlike Emacs most of it is so ephemeral that it's forgotten the next day.

[convolvatron]

my setup is 200 line long. on a new machine I just scp it over. many years ago they dropped support for automatically decoding files with a 'Z' extension, so I had to change that sometime in the 90s.

total time invested over 40 years - less than 4 hours.

[stjohnswarts]

It's also easy to sync your vscode setup between machines, although not quite as easy as vim and emacs (imho).

[bachmeier]

This is why I still use Emacs for a lot of things. Just not programming.