[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.