[Kessler83]

I mean rock solid as in being able to edit buffers with very different contents of half a million characters, every day for decades without crashing. I wouldn't call what you describe fragile. It sounds more like a typical learning experience. You did something, Emacs obeyed and then you who didn't like what you just did :). There is a market for restricting choice, so you are clearly not alone!

But I don't think that the Emacs learning curve should be exaggerated, either. If you start it up and follow the instructions, you very quickly become productive. What gets people into trouble is usually when they expect Emacs to be like software X which they already know, so they don't read what's on the screen and kind of skip the introduction. And then they get frustrated when they find out that Emacs is Emacs. I'm not saying that's you, or that it is stupid, impatient etc. or whatever. I'm just saying that I've seen it quite a few times.

[bmitc]

> I mean rock solid as in being able to edit buffers with very different contents of half a million characters, every day for decades without crashing.

There's nothing you can say to make me believe that.

Emacs is fragile. Any change, even the most simple change, to one's .emacs file can cause unexpected behavior. From fonts, to shell changes, etc. I have really wanted to like Emacs and get into it, but it's fragile from the very start.

> What gets people into trouble is usually when they expect Emacs to be like software X

This is the problem with Emacs. By default and by itself, it's nothing more than a glorified text editor. You have to update and configure it to get things to work as they should, but that's where the fragility comes in.

I've gone through this multiple times. Every time I try Emacs for some new language, I end up in configuration hell. The moment I switch to VSCode, while not perfect things just work, and I get to coding. Maybe I'll eventually bunker down in a hole and get Emacs to work as I'd expect, but that has not been accomplishable yet.

And I generally actually prefer using dedicated IDEs for languages. Otherwise, you're reliant on someone having implemented a usable Emacs mode.

[TacticalCoder]

> Emacs is fragile. Any change, even the most simple change, to one's .emacs file can cause unexpected behavior. From fonts, to shell changes, etc. I have really wanted to like Emacs and get into it, but it's fragile from the very start.

In Emacs you have control over absolutely everything so, of course, you can mess it up. The solution however is very simple, trivial even: just version your entire Emacs config in Git. Screw up something? Checkout the last known working version. There are people even going as far as versioning their entire user directory under Git (not just Emacs but everthing). At the OS level there are people using NixOS: where everything is reproducible.

You make it sound like it's not possible to have a deterministic system. It's not just possible: it's very easy (any dev should know how to use Git to revert back to a working Emacs config).

> And I generally actually prefer using dedicated IDEs for languages.

Then try the JetBrains tools. It's leaps and bounds above anything MS has to offer.

[bmitc]

> In Emacs you have control over absolutely everything so, of course, you can mess it up.

That's not necessarily a feature in my opinion, and I don't like the framing that's it's me messing things up and not Emacs or packages. Look, Emacs is super powerful, but people always respond to things being difficult in Emacs with something along the lines of "just do this and then you get rainbows and the pot of gold". In reality, you're spending hours reading documentation and random forum posts on how to do the simple thing you want. Next thing you know you're having to basically write your own features into Emacs.

The thing I balk at is people acting like Emacs is just some under appreciated tool that just has a learning curve. No, it has a learning curve plus the difficulty of understanding its ad hoc design and the multitudes of packages, the way they're written and interact with Emacs, and the millions of ways various people like to do things. I just wish people were more honest regarding its complexity and the vast multitudes of ways that people use it in very individualized manners.

And yes, I have previously managed my .emacs file in GitHub. Not sure why you commented on a bunch of that. It's still not as easy as VSCode automatically syncing via my GitHub account or working automatically through SSH.

> Then try the JetBrains tools. It's leaps and bounds above anything MS has to offer.

That's actually what I was referring to. I use Dr. Racket for Racket, Visual Studio for F#, VSCode right now for Elixir, but I've considered trying out the Jetbrains stuff for Elixir, and if I was using Clojure, I'd definitely use IntelliJ with Cursive.

[ReleaseCandidat]

> The solution however is very simple, trivial even: just version your entire Emacs config in Git.

And all installed packages.

> You make it sound like it's not possible to have a deterministic system. It's not just possible: it's very easy

If you never update a package or install a new one. The more packages you have installed and use and the more (major and minor) modes you use (simultaneously), the higher the possibility.

[jimmyvalmer]

> Emacs is fragile.

Correct. As an undergraduate in the 90s when OOP got in vogue, I puzzled at the bureacratic notion of data hiding and private variables. Emacs set me straight on why those things are important.

[donio]

Making changes to my .emacs never causes unexpected behavior. It does what I tell it to do.

Looking through my .emacs I really can't think of anything that would cause the chaotic behavior you describe. And the only revert I see in the last 10 years of git history is a key binding change that I decided I didn't like after all.

The only way I can see this happening is if you copy and paste random stuff from the internet without understanding it. But then what else could you expect.

[dotancohen]

I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but it's true.

Emacs is like dating a redhead. You're right: it is more fragile. It takes effort and dedication to figure out what you can do with it (more than you initially thought) and how to not upset it (more easily than you initially thought). But like the redhead, it's worth the effort.

[coldtea]

>I wouldn't call what you describe fragile. It sounds more like a typical learning experience. You did something, Emacs obeyed and then you who didn't like what you just did

That's the definition of fragile.

The famous "You're holding it wrong", even sounds benign compared to "it's just a learning experience".

[Kessler83]

No, the definition of fragile is that if you use something in a wrong way, it breaks. But Emacs doesn't break. It obeys and keeps running.

With your reasoning, all software that gives you a choice, anything that can be configured, all programming languages etc. etc., become fragile, because as soon as someone says "I did this but I didn't like the result," your case has been proved. In other words, it is a circular definition.

Anyway, I didn't mean learning experience in a condescending way. The user I answered indicated himself that he was learning---and we all are, when it comes to Emacs.

[AlexCoventry]

I just tried changing the font through the menubar (Options -> Set Default Font) and wound up with a font which was unreadable, due to being only a couple of pixels high. I never use the menubar, so I'm insulated from that kind of issue (and I'm running bleeding-edge emacs, so it could be a transient bug), but I could see it being a showstopper for new users.

[AJRF]

emacs users just live in another world entirely, this whole interaction I find typical of users who evangelize for emacs, and for some reason those users can never see the error of their thinking.

You sound like a zealot for thinking a settings menu breaking when trying to change a setting is acceptable.

[Kessler83]

Don't mean to come off like a zealot. To me, it sounds like the user accessed a show/hide-function in the graphical interface while using the mouse, and then didn't know how to bring it back (Control-Right Click or menu-bar-mode). The mistake and the ability to hide the menu-bar are both super common in any application and don't make Emacs fragile. Instructions for how to hide/un-hide stuff are in the manual.

I think people are just kidding themselves when they arrive at the conclusion that a program like Emacs---which is super mature, has a huge user base amongst very picky programmers and has survived in fierce competition for 45 years---is somehow fundamentally flawed, fragile etc. Of course it isn't. But it might not be your thing, and that's fine.

[AJRF]

I use emacs daily and have done for 5+ years now. Even with that, It's undeniable that it makes some tragic choices that keep it from being popular in the modern day.

You see every few years a project to modernize emacs and get wider mindshare among developer community, and they always fail due to some stubborn choices due to stalwarts not admitting when they are wrong.

I have more faith in VSCode sticking around for the next 10 years than I do Emacs.

[Koshkin]

I am sure emacs will be alive and well in 20 years. (8MB and constantly swapping and all…)

[natrys]

> I have more faith in VSCode sticking around for the next 10 years than I do Emacs.

I mean, almost everyone is confident about that too. And rightfully so because, VSCode actually has real corporate backing. People are being actually paid to develop it and sometimes plugins for it, so it would be a surprise if it didn't pan out. Nobody is getting paid to work on Emacs, or third party elisp libraries. It has always been individual hackers doing the bits that interests them. I don't want to come across like anybody owes Emacs anything. But I think in forums people sometimes take the reverse for granted, like Emacs owes anyone anything. Or that the people who actually bother to do voluntary work share the same vision of modernity as them, so it's a failure of some sort when that isn't exactly delivered.

> You see every few years a project to modernize emacs and get wider mindshare among developer community, and they always fail due to some stubborn choices due to stalwarts not admitting when they are wrong.

I think this is a mischaracterisation. Because, firstly you don't actually need the approval of the "stalwarts" to modernise it. Doom Emacs is making a name of its own just fine. The other thing is, Emacs is old. Most of the old vanguards aren't actively involved in Emacs development any more. Most of the "stalwarts" now weren't even around for most of the mistakes, why would you attribute things to vanity when it was not current stalwarts personally who were responsible for most of the design goals?

Browsing emacs-devel, it's clear that the real problem is acute lack of manpower. Only a fraction of Emacs users do bug reports, and then only a tiny fraction of them do actually get involved in fixing things. Which means the maintainers are always facing an uphill battle, who by the way don't have domain expertise or historical understanding of why things are the way they are, any more than you or I do, in many of the situations. Compared to that, VSCode is only a few years old, there are probably engineers who are familiar with the entire codebase, from conception to now.

That said, it has always been more or less like this. Emacs will be fine in its own way, because it will always attract certain sort of hackers. So sure, in terms of "mindshare" and "percentage of users", Emacs will keep free falling, specially now that software development itself has become way more pervasive. It might continue to get more out of touch with "modernity". However, as someone who has been in Emacs community for 7 years now, I believe the ecosystem is only getting more and more vibrant each year than the one before, in absolute terms (more mailing list or other forum activities, more landmark features, more new and high quality third party libraries etc.).

[tharne]

> emacs users just live in another world entirely, this whole interaction I find typical of users who evangelize for emacs

It's not that emacs users "live in another world entirely", it's that some things a very difficult to explain to folks who don't have first-hand experience of those things. Try describing what minus 20 degrees Celsius feels like to someone who's spent their entire life in Florida, or Brazil. You can't really, it has to be experienced to be understood.

It's no different with emacs. Emacs doesn't really make any sense until you use it for a while, then all of sudden you "get it" and don't want to use anything else.

[jimmyvalmer]

> You can't really, it has to be experienced to be understood.

No, I'm pretty sure everyone knows what fragile software feels like. Disclaimer: I've been using fragile emacs as long as most HN users have been alive.

[bmitc]

It's surprising to me why people think the "you just don't get it, man" defense or marketing point will ever work.

[nawgz]

> With your reasoning, all software that gives you a choice, anything that can be configured, all programming languages etc. etc., become fragile, because as soon as someone says "I did this but I didn't like the result," your case has been proved

That's not at all true. It's called "validation" and "error handling". What kind of farce are you getting at? You unironically think a text editor that lets you break its settings panel by trying to use the settings panel normally isn't fragile?

Edited to remove cheapshot at parent comment

[nawgz]

I am quite annoyed at downvotes that don't challenge my assertion. Any UI which allows you to directly compromise the environment to the point of requiring a fresh install is the very definition of fragile. I understand that HN is strongly biased against UI development and undervalues the domain, believing instead that tools only accessible to experts are fine, but I think this is an extremely user-hostile POV and to advocate for tools to have this level of footgun built into A FONT MENU is comically sloppy. I can only imagine the comments if someone did this in JS, yet because it's emacs? No comments, only downvotes

[danielvaughn]

I'm on the fence about this one, because tools for consumers are a bit different than tools for technologists. Yes UX matters for us as well, but there's a commonly accepted belief that initial-difficulty-of-use is worth the eventual efficiency gains that the tool offers. I've never gotten into Emacs but I believe devs when they say it makes them hyper-productive.