[paines]

He cannot use Emacs and then goes to ... Vim ?!?! Nothing against Vim or Emacs, I love both but they had their time which is long gone. I am using Linux ans OSS technolgies since 95 and would have never imagined to advocate a MS product, but just use VS Code. It's awesome. VS Code managed to by-pass the qualitiy and amount of extensions/plugins in a fraction of time Emacs took decades.

[cess11]

Kind of weird to compare a sluggish, bug ridden, Javascript application to vim, no?

Same with emacs, now that they've spent some time on performance.

VSCode sits in a weird limbo. It's not an IDE, and it's not an excellent editor. The plugins are usually rudimentary but there's a lot of them. There's no community, instead there's one of the nastiest corporations on the planet faking one.

[troad]

I feel like the oldest cycle in tech is the "easy and good enough" defeating the "more elegant / powerful, but more tricky".

Re VS Code, I wouldn't say it's in a weird limbo - on the contrary, I think that a "smart-ish, extensible editor" is exactly what lots of people actually want. IDEs are too heavy for many folk, vim/emacs too hard, Notepad too dumb. Things like VS Code hit a sweet spot, hence their popularity.

[cess11]

Emacs is very simple. It has point-and-click menus and tries very hard to generously interpret mistakes and show helpful error messages. I wouldn't call it tricky, unlike the command language in vim.

Power tools aren't as common as regular hammers and saws and so on, i.e. 'less popular', but among professionals few would prefer the unpowered ones just because the threshold to bring one out is lower.

[troad]

That's interesting; I find vim so much more intuitive than emacs. I find commands easier to reason about (and easier on the fingers) than chords. `dd` over `C-a C-k` or `C-S-Backspace`, for example.

I also think the discoverability in emacs, despite the nice point-and-click interface, is always going to be hampered by the idiosyncratic vocabulary. If you don't already know emacs, `Buffers > *scratch*` isn't going to mean anything to you. And if you do know emacs, you're just going to use the chord. So who's the audience for the point-and-click? People who know what scratch buffers are, but don't know how to use emacs? I don't imagine there are many of those.

> Power tools aren't as common as regular hammers and saws and so on, i.e. 'less popular', but among professionals few would prefer the unpowered ones just because the threshold to bring one out is lower.

Agreed, but I suspect many more professional programmers use VS Code than vim and emacs put together. Though I suspect even more use IDEs.

[cess11]

Maybe, but the basics of text editing are quite obvious. There are large buttons that are easily recognisable, and you'll quickly realise that a buffer is something like an open file.

Sure, that might be the case. I'm not as sure it is good just because it might be the case.

[siknad]

VS Code support for Common Lisp is lacking. Alive extension is relatively recent and is a solo effort and thus has significant bugs and is not as feature packed as Vim/Emacs alternatives. For example, it doesn't provide structural editing. It's interaction with sbcl cache seemingly broke my project a few times.

[Dansvidania]

Lots of people work with Vim and Emacs day to day, what makes them "long gone" in your opinion?

[bigstrat2003]

I haven't used emacs so I won't speak to that. But a GUI editor (be it Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode, JetBrains, whatever) does everything vim does and is far easier and more pleasant to use. I think that using vim instead of a GUI editor is kind of like using a hand saw instead of power tools - you can do it, but you're willingly giving up a better option for a worse one. Vim made sense in a day when computers were based around text terminals, but we don't live in that day any more and it doesn't make sense to use tools that are limited by that paradigm any more.

For serious work, a GUI editor (Sublime is my choice) beats the pants off vim. The only situation I use a terminal editor is when I'm editing config files on servers, and vim sucks at that too - nano is far superior for quick and dirty edits to files. I simply do not think there's a use case where vim makes sense any more.

[iLemming]

Both Vim and Emacs have GUIs. Emacs can even render your PDFs and webpages, you can have svg icons displayed while browsing directories.

[vrighter]

I'm used to vim, editing in anything else is anything but pleasant. It's subjective. It's not about speed or anything. I think slower than I type, so the bottleneck is not my editing speed. But ergonomically it's more pleasant for me to use. Because I barely have to move my hands, and it has very powerful movements.

[lenkite]

Neovim beats the pants off Sublime any day. Vim modal editing is the definition of power tools - you have it exactly backward. But like any powerful tool, it needs training.

[Shorel]

That's not true. Anything modal editing can do, I can do with Sublime Text, and some things I can do, for example having thousands of cursors simultaneously adding code, can't be done in Vim. If you know how to use your tools, they are power tools.

You will say... oh but my fingers are in the home row! It doesn't matter. I can use the cursor keys just as fast and without having to look at the keyboard, their spatial positions are burned into my brain. And I don't need to change modes to use them! Your way is not superior to my way.

However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors, so Vim and Emacs integration is much better. And that's an orthogonal issue to the fact that some editors allow you to do things one way or another.

[lispm]

> However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors,

They use the "language server" model since a long time, before Microsoft's LSP existed. Thus the need isn't really there, unless one wants to develop with Microsoft products (or similar) and get the needed extensions for Lisp into those Microsoft driven standards. If there were a real need and a real benefit, there would be some better adoption on the Lisp side.

[snozolli]

Not GP, but I've always found it weird how many people are obsessed with vi/vim and/or Emacs. I get some of the extensibility appeal of Emacs if you're a Lisp fan, but fundamentally I don't understand the appeal of "programming your brain" just to edit code. 90% of my code editing time is spent reading and thinking, not writing or modifying. Memorizing and minimizing (e.g. VimGolf) editor syntax seems like a massive waste of time and cognitive function to me. Modern IDEs have you up and running instantly, and their refactoring tools are really amazing.

I feel like there's been a boom in "editor hipsterism" in the last 10 - 15 years, while everyone has forgotten the variety of novel editors that were made in the 80s and 90s (I've forgotten them, too, I just remember seeing ads and reviews in magazines as a young programmer).

For context, I do have a basic understanding of vim because I run it on servers, but my knowledge doesn't go far beyond search and replace.

[nanolith]

To each their own. With Vim, Unix is my IDE. I don't know about the recent interest in these editors that you mention. I've been using vi/Vim for the past 30 years. I take it to every project and job. My fingers already know what to do. I've watched colleagues who I started working with 20 years ago as they've retooled on the latest hotness every 4-5 years. Visual Studio, Netbeans, Eclipse, Jetbrains, VS Code, etc. It doesn't take long to learn to use a new IDE, but they are definitely shorter term investments.

I can do more or less the same thing most folks can with an IDE; I just use external tools. I wouldn't claim that Vim is somehow superior. It's just what I use. Every now and then, I noodle a bit on a personal editor that is to ed what Vim is to vi. At some point, I'll migrate to it.

I think there is a bit of a different philosophy that the editor folks have. I can't speak for them, but I can speak for me. I like to feel closer to the code base. I like to have more of it in my head. The best analogy I've found is that using an editor like Vim or Emacs is closer to driving with a manual transmission and with tight steering controls, compared to driving with an automatic transmission with partial self-driving features found in modern cars. There is definitely something to be said about things like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assist, GPS navigation, etc. But, if you talk to a manual transmission enthusiast, there is a thrill of feeling closer to the road and being more engaged. Both folks arrive at the destination in the same amount of time. But, if you ask each about their experience, they will have much different views of the drive organized in their head.

[Shorel]

> I wouldn't claim that Vim is somehow superior. It's just what I use.

Exactly, that's your editor and you are used to it. There is no reason at all for you to consider to change editors.

I use Sublime Text, it's my editor, it has been for a decade and I am used to it.

I don't have Copilot or similar, and I'm glad I don't. Not interested in such a thing.

[snozolli]

To each their own.

And yet I get down-voted for expressing a well-reasoned opinion against vim and Emacs.

I've been using vi/Vim for the past 30 years. I take it to every project and job.

I've rarely used an IDE that didn't allow custom key bindings, often with the ability to select a set from a drop-down list to match other IDEs. I've been using mostly the same keyboard shortcuts across IDEs for over 20 years.

if you talk to a manual transmission enthusiast, there is a thrill of feeling closer to the road and being more engaged

Funny you should say that, because I regularly enrage these types by pointing out that if they can't stay engaged as a driver with an automatic transmission, then the problem is with them, not the car. This is a quasi-religious ritual with these people, and a very low-effort way to get a sense of superiority over others (i.e. every driver on the road before ~1970 had experience with a manual transmission and literally anyone can learn in a few hours. It's not a skill to be proud of).

[nanolith]

and a very low-effort way to get a sense of superiority over others... literally anyone can learn in a few hours.

I agree that it is a skill that is easy to learn. The same is true of IDEs. This isn't about skill or superiority, but comfort. Some folks are more comfortable being closer to the machine or the road, as it were. Others are more comfortable having some automation between them and the machine. I think that the better to consider this a matter of personal preference.

The IDE adds a layer of abstraction, and abstraction can be leaky. If you are comfortable with the abstraction, and with the opinionated choices the IDE makes, that's fine. If you are not, that's also fine. All that I ask when I'm bootstrapping a project with a team is that projects be arranged such that they are IDE / editor agnostic. Use standard build configuration / build tools that have appropriate plugins for IDEs, and can also be run in the terminal / command-line. Then, the individual developer can choose to use whichever editor or IDE that developer is comfortable using.

[snozolli]

This isn't about skill or superiority, but comfort.

The down-votes that I continue to get in this thread tell a different story.

[bcrosby95]

I like vim because the keybindings are familiar everywhere. For small server stuff I use vim, for most coding I use Doom Emacs (vim keybindings), and for Java I use Intellij with vim keybindings.

I mostly use Emacs because of org mode. It's way better than anything else trying to fill this hole. Otherwise I'd probably just use VSCode. But I don't want to add yet another editor to my regular use.

[f1shy]

Emacs provides far more than just editing. Helps a lot with reading and VC (magit). Just magit would IMHO justify Emacs.

[anthk]

With vim you run factoring tools as an external tools.

Massive wasting of time? with vim you can do something in seconds that with an IDE you would last minutes if not ours.

Check out:

- entr to run commands on modifying files/directories

- plain Makefiles to run your code: git://bitreich.org/english_knight

- LSP and alike tools for your language

[snozolli]

Massive wasting of time?

I feel like you only read half of that sentence.

entr to run commands on modifying files/directories

Alt-Tab to the command console that I always have running.

plain Makefiles to run your code

I have no idea what the advantage is here. F5 to run my code, including scripted deployment.

LSP and alike tools for your language

I don't know what this means.

[Dansvidania]

i prefer to use the mouse as little as possible, i feel more productive when I can stay on the home-row of the keyboard, that is primarily it for me. This is because hotkeys are more direct, exact and easier to memorize than mouse motions

it helps that vim bindings are adopted in many places so learning and using them ports well to browsing and even managing windows (vimium and aerospace respectively)

secondarily, while i don't think using the terminal is generally better than GUI I tend to work in the terminal anyway, so keeping text editing there makes sense.

[Shorel]

> This is because hotkeys are more direct, exact and easier to memorize than mouse motions

Did you ever try Opera 5.12 mouse gestures? That was a feature that completely contradicted your statement. The gestures were direct, unambiguous, and easier to memorize than any set of Ctrl+key shortcuts.

Sadly, that feature has never been fully replicated. The closest I found is Vivaldi, which I am using now, but it is not exactly the same.

[Dansvidania]

I never tried. I will take a look.

[iLemming]

> I've always found it weird how many people are obsessed with vi/vim and/or Emacs.

Because you've never truly done it. Like someone who has seen all three sides, I can tell you this: I have never, even once, even for a second, ever regretted my time invested in learning Vim and Emacs. Vim is hands-down the best mental model for navigating through text - I use it everywhere - in my editor, in my terminal, in my browser; heck, I use it system-wide - in my window manager. It's immensely empowering - being able to control things without losing context - your fingertips are in control of everything, you don't even need to shift your hand to touch the mouse or arrow keys. It also liberates you from learning myriad key combinations for every single app, it gives you freedom from having to learn, remember and having to perform weird dactylar dance, where sometimes you can't even reach the exact keys without looking down at your keyboard, not to mention the ergonomics.

And then Emacs. OMG, Emacs is so amazing, you just have no idea. The things you can do in Emacs are hard to describe in words - you just need to see it.

> 90% of my code editing time is spent reading and thinking, not writing or modifying

I spent most of my time taking notes. Emacs is the best tool for that. Matter of fact, I find Emacs is the best tool for any kind of text manipulation. I don't even type anything longer than three words in any app anymore. I'm typing this exact comment in Emacs right now. Why wouldn't I? I have all the tools I need at my disposal - spellchecking, dictionaries, translation, etymology and definition lookup, access to various LLMs - chatgpt, claude, ollama, perplexity, and others, search engines - here's a real, practical example: I would type a search query once and it sends requests to Google, Wikipedia, GitHub, YouTube, etc. I then can pick up the YouTube url, open the video and control its playback while typing - I can pause, mute, resume, speed up the video. All that with the emphasis of the main task at hand - taking notes. Done without leaving the window where the notes are being typed, without having to switch your focus - your mind remains "in the zone". I'm telling you - that's some blackmagic fuckery for staying productive and happy. It's enormously fun when you have complete control over the things happening on your screen.

> I've always found it weird

There's nothing truly "weird" about it. If you are a computer programmer, you do want to be in control of the computing happening on your computer. It's rather weird when there's the opposite - when computer programmers become merely "users", when they are told that "you're holding it wrong" and "users don't know what they want". I for one do exactly what I want - I want the shit on my computer to work and work on my terms, not anyone else's.

[snozolli]

I have all the tools I need at my disposal

Yes, we've all heard the saying that Emacs is an operating system with a text editor built in.

I for one do exactly what I want - I want the shit on my computer to work and work on my terms, not anyone else's.

That's exactly what I get out of the IDEs I've used for decades. This whole argument is so weird, disingenuous, and full of vague strawmen. Just because I don't see the value in investing the time that you have doesn't mean that I'm for giving up control or whatever you were trying frame me as.

Anyway, I'm done here. This site is full of toxic people who are offended that someone doesn't choose the same editor and habits that they do, and any dissent is to be punished.

[iLemming]

I don't think I've made any arguments at all, and definitely haven't said anything disingenuous. I'm not trying to sell you dogmas, and I'm not telling you how to live your life. I have only attempted to share a glimpse of the world you clearly have little understanding of - the assumption that I (not unreasonably) made based on your own words.

Perhaps my usage of pronouns in the last paragraph was confusing; I apologize for that. Since we're talking on a public forum, the "you" wasn't aimed specifically at your persona; I meant it in a generic sense, talking about a "proverbial" programmer.

> This site is full of toxic people who are offended that someone doesn't choose the same editor

I don't know where you're getting this kind of vibe from; my comments are free of toxicity. I think this particular website and the world in general is full of all sorts of people. And if you genuinely try to find helpful and beneficial thoughts and inspiration, you may find some - even within the words of criticism and discouragement. Conversely, someone who sees toxicity whenever they don't get conformance with their views may reap only bitterness and dissatisfaction.

Perhaps you should reflect on the source of your anger; just don't waste energy searching for it in my statements - after all, I merely showed you possibilities. I never forced you toward them - the choice to step through or turn away remains entirely in your hands.

[lispm]

> That's exactly what I get out of the IDEs I've used for decades. This whole argument is so weird, disingenuous, and full of vague strawmen. Just because I don't see the value in investing the time that you have doesn't mean that I'm for giving up control or whatever you were trying frame me as.

I used IDEs also all the time. Makes sense to me.

> Anyway, I'm done here. This site is full of toxic people who are offended that someone doesn't choose the same editor and habits that they do, and any dissent is to be punished.

Yeah, that's weird. You can use all kinds of editors you like. In the case of Lisp, there are arguments that good support for editing Lisp and for interaction with a Lisp runtime is useful (since Lisp is often used interactively). But several IDEs and editors can do that.

Just wanted to give you the impression that are others, who like IDEs and similar tools. ;-)

[uludag]

> VS Code managed to by-pass the qualitiy and amount of extensions/plugins in a fraction of time Emacs took decades.

I get the impression that the VSCode has a rather fractured, limited, malware-infested[1][2], JavaScript-churn inundated plugin ecosystem. You have lots of choice, but I'm would be just as hesitant using a random extension as I would downloading some random executable and running it. On the other hand, I'm genuinely surprised (in a good way) how OCD some Emacs users are with the code I publish to MELPA.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07479 [2] https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/visual-studio-code-has-mali...

[dannymi]

Thanks, but no thanks.

I don't like vscode extensions advertising to me every 5 seconds, auto-downgrading the free versions of extensions, auto-installing aux tools every 5 seconds, having a 400 MB RSS chromium runtime (remember Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping? VS code is much worse; and it's also just a plain text editor); nerfing the .net debugger and breaking hot reload on purpose in VSCodium; telemetry, .... it's so noisy all the time. You are using this? On purpose?!

VS code is basically the same idea as emacs, just the MVP variant and with a lot of questionable technology choices (Javascript? Electron? Then emulate terminal cells anyway and manually copy cell contents? uhhh. What is this? Retrofuturism?) and done with the usual Microsoft Embrace-Extend-Extinguish tactics (nerfing pylance, funny license terms on some extensions that the extensions are only allowed to be used in their vscode etc).

So if you didn't like emacs you probably wouldn't like vscode either.

Also, if you use anything BUT emacs for Lisp development, what do you use that doesn't have a jarring break between the Lisp image and you? vim seems weird for that use case :)

emacs is very very good for Lisp development.

On the other hand, VSCode for Lisp is very flaky and VSCode regularily breaks your Lisp projects. Did you try it?

Because of your comment I tried VSCode again and now about 20 extensions (one of them "Alive", a Lisp extension for vscode) complain about now missing

  "Dev container: Docker from Docker Compose"

(keep in mind they worked before and I didn't change anything in vscode--I hadn't even run VSCode for 8 months or so) and when I try to fix that by clicking on the message in the extension manager the message immediately disappears from all 20 extensions in the manager (WTF?) and I get:

>>./logs/20250112T181356/window1/exthost/ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers/remoteContainers-2025-01-12T17-13-58.234Z.log: >>>> Executing external compose provider "/home/dannym/.guix-home/profile/bin/podman-compose". Please see podman-compose(1) for how to disable this message. <<<< >a239310d8b933dc85cc7671d2c90a75580fc57a309905298170eac4e7618d0c1 >Error: statfs /var/run/docker.sock: no such file or directory >Error: no container with name or ID "serverdevcontainer_app_1" found: no such container

... because it's using podman (I didn't configure that--vscode did that on its own, incompletely. Also, it thinks that means having a docker/podman service running as root has to be a thing then (instead of rootless podman). Funny thing is I use podman extensively. I don't wanna know how bad it would be if I HADN'T set podman up already).

So it didn't actually fix anything, but it removed the error message. I see. And there's no REPL for the editor--so I can't actually find out details, let alone fix anything.

I had thought emacs DX was bad--but I've revised my opinion now: compared to vscode DX, emacs DX is great. You live with VSCode if you want to.

And note, vscode was made after emacs was made. There's no excuse for this.

I think this now was about all the time that I want to waste on this thing, again.

How is this a problem in 2025? shakes head

>VS Code managed to by-pass the qualitiy and amount of extensions/plugins in a fraction of time Emacs took decades.

Yeah? Seems to me these vscode extensions are written in crayon. Bad quality like that would never make it into emacs mainline. And it's not even strictly about that! I wonder who would write a developer tool that the developer can't easily debug its own extensions in (yes, I know about Ctrl-Shift-P). That flies about as well as a lead balloon.

For comparison, there's emacs bufferenv that does dev containerization like this and it works just fine. Configuration: 1 line--the names of the containerfiles one wants it to pick up. Also, if I wanted to debug what it did (which is rare) I could just evaluate any expression whatsoever in emacs. ("Alt-ESC : «expression»" anywhere)

PS. manually running "podman-compose up" in an example project as a regular user works just fine--starts up the project and everything needed. So what are they overcomplicating here? Pipes too hard?

PPS. I've read some blog article to make socket activation work for rootless podman[1] but it's not really talking about vscode. Instead, it talks how one would set up "linger" so that the container stays there when I'm logged out. So that's not for dev containers (why would I possibly want that there? I'm not ensuring Heisenbugs myself :P).

[1] https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...

[iLemming]

> they had their time which is long gone

Haha, yeah, sure, but of course, no! Similar shit has been said so many times since 1990s. Yet both Vim and Emacs still have vibrant communities, have dedicated conferences, they get mentioned almost every week - here on HN, and every day on Reddit.

Emacs, in experienced hands, absolutely kicks everything out of the ballpark; it's just hands-down the best tool with unmatched text manipulation capabilities. Anyone who says otherwise simply is unaware what you can do in Emacs.

Can anyone in the grand community of VSCode users claim to have a workflow that involves:

- Reading a pdf where the colors match the current color scheme? The scheme that automatically adjusts the colors based on time of the day (because Emacs has built-in solar and lunar calendars)?

- Where they do annotate the said pdf in their notes, where you can jump to the places in pdf from the notes and vice-versa? Where you can scroll the pdf, without even having to switch windows, because you're in the middle of typing?

- Where you can open a video and control its playback - pausing and resuming it in place, directly from your editor, whilst typing?

- Where you also extract subtitles and copy some text chunks for your notes? Where you can run LLM to extract summary for your notes of the said transcript?

- Where you can resume the video-playback at some position in the transcript? Where you can watch the video and chunks of the transcript text get automatically highlighted - the karaoke style?

- Where you can simply type 'RFC-xxx' and despite that being a plain text entry, Emacs intelligently recognizes what that is and lets you browse the RFC entry, in-place, without even googling for it? Or similarly have plain-text of e.g., 'myorg/foo#34' and browse that Pull-Request and even perform the review with diffs and everything?

- Speaking of googling, can you type a search query only once and let it run through different places, finding things in Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, GitHub, your browser's history and personal emails? Or any other places, since it's highly configurable?

- Do you use translation, dictionaries, thesaurus, etymology and definition lookup for any words and phrases, in the midst of typing? I have bound "auto-correct previous typo" to a double tap of the comma key - it's super convenient. Can you do something like that in VSCode easily?

- Do you edit code comments and docstrings in the code, treating them as markdown - with all the syntax highlighting, preview, and other perks?

- Do you have embedded LaTeX formulas directly in your notes?

And that's just a tiny fraction of things I personally do in Emacs - it's just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other interesting and highly pragmatic Emacs packages people use for various kinds of tasks. Speaking of packages - my config contains over 300 different Emacs packages, and I still can restart and load it under a second. Can you imagine any VS Code user having installed even half of that many plugins? Would that still be a "workable" environment?

[selestify]

How do you get started on learning all that? I’ve never come close to getting such productivity out of Emacs.

[iLemming]

Hmm... well, it's of course very difficult to explain the process in a single comment, besides, there's no exact prescribed "recipe" for it, unfortunately.

I'd say the mental model for developing the 'Emacs way of thinking' lies, first and foremost, in realizing that Emacs is not "an editor that uses Lisp for configuring it," but rather a 'Lisp Machine' - calling it that would be a stretch, of course. Allow me this simplification here. Emacs is a 'Lisp REPL' that has a built-in editor. That means, instead of focusing on the features of the editor, it's better to study Emacs Lisp and the ways of using it to shape the editor's features.

The great way of developing knack for Lisp is to start with figuring out mainly two things: first, is so called "REPL-driven development". For Elisp that basically means learning the ways of evaluating symbolic-expressions: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Li...

Second thing, even though some experts would argue for being optional, I still believe is very important - structural editing commands: ways for quickly moving symbolic expressions around, expanding and transposing them, etc. - you do want to control those (seemingly pesky at first) parenthesis. There are multiple different ways of dealing with those - paredit, smartparens, parinfer, etc.

Then, learning how to effectively search through built-in help, finding the functions, commands, variables, etc. - the stock features already good, although the keybindings and navigating through them might be confusing, there are different packages that can help - consult-info, helpful, etc.

And then, one basically has to get annoyed by small inefficiencies in their workflow. Examples? Do you often have to copy&paste the url of the current tab in your browser while typing? Seemingly simple activity, still requires you to: switching to the browser, focusing on the address bar, copying the url, switching back to the editor, pasting the url, sometimes, it doesn't end there, you need to switch back to the browser, copy the description of the page, switch back to the editor, paste the description, wrap things in a markdown-type of link, etc. Most people would say: "what a nonsense, it's not a big deal, like at all...". But if you think for a minute, how often do you have to do that? Every day, during the lifetime of your computer use. These kind of small inefficiencies are not really distractions for the brain, in fact, that all is over-stimulation of neurons. You may think that you've done that so many times, it actually happens so quickly, you don't even think about it, yet, it still forces your brain "out of the zone", even though might be just for a second.

Another personal example: at some point, I got annoyed by my own typing - I make typos all the time, so I needed a quicker way of automatically fixing typos as I type. First, I wrote a command that does that, and then I bound it to a key - to a double tap of the comma. I'd be typing, and typing, then a typo gets highlighted, I'd quickly tap comma twice and it gets fixed with 90% of predictability. Sometimes it would guess a wrong word, and then if I keep pressing the comma, it would cycle through variants. It feels great beyond words, and it is so instinctive and fast, I don't get distracted at all. Imagine a guitar player with a performance so wild that strings get snapped every few seconds. Imagine that instead of having to replace the entire guitar, there's a special mechanism on it that quickly installs a new string and tunes it up immediately, so the performance goes on without any hiccups. That's what using Emacs often feels to me.

So, my personal advice - simply be annoyed by small things. Then, put them on your TODO list. At some point, you'll get annoyed again and again. Note it each time. And then, try to find a better way to do that thing. The rate of getting more productive is proportional to the level of accrued annoyance.