Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ReleaseCandidat 1676 days ago
> Rock, rock, rock solid no matter what I through at it.

That's actually not how I would describe Emacs. Not for Common Lisp either, Sly (and before that Slime) always had some glitches where I had to restart them or Emacs.

1 comments

Well, to each their own. I never have to restart Emacs. The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something. I'm sure I could avoid restarting SLIME, too---I just never bothered to learn if there is a way.

BTW, all software that changes will have a bug from time to time, but Emacs and things related to Common Lisp are like at the very bottom of the trouble-frequency charts. I can't think of any software that I use regularly that gives me fewer problems. For the record I never encountered a bug in either (which doesn't mean they don't exist).

The problem with Emacs' configuration file is that it's processed in an additive way. Removing options and reloading the config does absolutely nothing. So in certain situations a restart is just inevitable.

But aside from that Emacs, like most programs, has a UX philosophy that I can't stand. And while Emacs lets me change that I don't want to manually redefine things for every single filetype and mode I'm using. Vim just does it right unless I make the mistake of writing JS in HTML files.

Vim is a fantastic editor---no argument there!

But you can always revert a configuration choice you made without restarting Emacs. Either use the built in configuration interface, or evaluate a form with the change. For example, if you set something to t you can reset it to nil and just C-x-e that form.

>The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something.

That's not something you shouldn't do and you also shouldn't need to restart Slime. Just break using `C-c C-c` and do a 'retry'.