[vq]

I work almost exclusively in Emacs without the modern LSP-based tools. I believe I do keep more in my head than programmers that use more advanced IDEs.

In code I have control over myself I avoid imports that doesn't enumerate all imported symbols. That is I always use the import Library (symbol) syntax in Haskell and never do wildcard import in Python.

When coding C I sometimes use tags so that I can go to definitions quickly, I should probably use it more than I do to be honest.

I do use hippie-expand for quick auto-completion but it is completely textual, it has no understanding of the programming language it currently works on which makes it much less powerful of course but it also has some benefits.

I always have the documentation very reachable, I use a search keyword in my browser to search on hoogle. I type H <Space> symbol/type-expression <Enter> and I quickly find the documentation.

I do use Visual Studio on a Windows box for working on a C# codebase a couple of times per year and when I do I always turn off that code lens thing and I find that I rely on the code navigation features quite a bit. Part of it is probably due to it being a code base that is larger and that C#(/Java)-flavoured OOP makes the code more spread out. In terser languages like Haskell (which is much terser) it is natural for more functionality or types to live in the same file which means that you get much further with just simple textual search.

[reidrac]

That was me for 7 years (using vim instead of Emacs), and it was working fine with Python and Go. I used ctags for navigation, some shortcuts for pydoc, and that was essentially it.

Then I started working with Scala and, until metals (the language server for Scala) and LSP support was good enough (first vim, now I'm a happy nvim user), it was awful.

So I'm certain it depends on the language. My take before Scala clicked for me was that I didn't want to use a language that required an IDE (or IDE-alike features) to be productive. And I think that opinion was mostly because my bad experience with Java.

I still write C without LSP, and I'm fine.

[098799]

Despite many years of development, I find lsp and eglot to me mostly unusably slow. I need my emacs to be fast and the only way to achieve that is something oldschool like Jedi/Elpy for python.

[gotts]

> I work almost exclusively in Emacs without the modern LSP-based tools

I'm wondering how many people in the comments would misinterpret it as "Emacs is outdated"/"Emacs does not have modern LSP-based tools"

[Scarblac]

I was about to switch from Emacs when I found TIDE for Typescript development (which is what I do), and it kept me in Emacs for years longer.

Recently though I couldn't resist experimenting with Copilot and I switched to VS code for it, after 32 years. Is there a good Emacs module for it by now?

[gotts]

I don't know whether there is Copilot module for Emacs, sorry. I'm more of a fan of gptel approach https://github.com/karthink/gptel with explicit context and instructions.

[zkry]

There's definitely a lot of choices in Emacs land for these new LLM tools. There's copilot mode, chatgpt shell, gptel, theres so'e more from other AI startups. Plus writing LLM integrations for Emacs is a breeze with everything being text buffers.

[IceDane]

I've been using copilot-mode in emacs for probably a couple of years.

[Nab443]

I've not used copilot outside of emacs, but copilot-mode does everything I would want for code generation.

[vq]

The reason I spelled it out is because I don't use them even though they are available. I realise now that what I wrote is ambiguous, thanks for mentioning it.

[brabel]

But that's bullshit. emacs has had most of the tools that LSP enables, it just had that only for some languages that had better emacs modes (C, elisp, Common Lisp etc.). All LSP is doing is making it easier to write modes for new languages really. emacs with eglot (not the LSP modes which are generally terrible) is a great IDE, and does thing the emacs way. Saying you use emacs but don't like "LSP" feels like a joke to me. The very reason SLIME was so great decades before IDEs became mainstream was that it was already a powerful IDE, it just does the IDE things a bit different than you're probably used to.

[UltraSane]

" I work almost exclusively using a drafting table and pencil without modern 3D CAD software"