[dwb]

The joke is that it's overly complicated to do a simple thing in Emacs, and you have to rely on blindly running shakily-trustworthy third-party code to do that thing for you. (I like Emacs very much, I use it every day, but there is a kernel of truth to this and I laughed.)

[roenxi]

Definitely a younger crowd. Back in my day if you blindly copied code without reading the documentation thoroughly there is no way that Emacs would be doing anything remotely useful. That was the sort of thing Emacs was mocked for, in fact - you really needed to get in amongst Elisp to customise it and nobody goes out of their way to learn Elisp.

Being able to blindly copy use-package statements has been one of the best parts of the Emacs modernisation effort.

[dwb]

Oh for sure, I agree, and I've blindly imported reams of elisp dependencies myself!

[umanwizard]

What’s a (real) example of a simple thing that’s hard to do in emacs?

[dwb]

I mean I think if you compare to, say, VSCode, writing any amount of [Emacs] Lisp to customise anything at all is "hard". I like it! It means I can customise more or less whatever I like, but it's a different universe.

[globular-toast]

I mean, surely such a thing is harder in VS Code considering you can't really do it.