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by TacticalCoder
1675 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.