Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by theshrike79 303 days ago
LSP (Language Server Protocol) was the final nail in the coffin of Emacs for me.

VSCode was "good enough" for pretty much every language with LSP at that point, I did't even bother with Jetbrains ides outside of work after that.

And when Obsidian replaced org-mode for me, I deleted my .emacs directory from my dotfiles repository.
2 comments
themafia 303 days ago
> LSP (Language Server Protocol) was the final nail in the coffin of Emacs for me.

It was the opposite for me. Emacs + LSP + many other common conveniences all bind together so beautifully and efficiently that I can't imagine using any other IDE at this point.

link
austinjp 303 days ago
Indeed. I'm a long time Emacs user (emacs-nox in the terminal). After spending a day getting LSP and eglot working, I'm loving the "IDE" experience. Reliable indentation, auto-complete, intelligent var renaming, real-time(ish) warnings and error messages, etc, all the good stuff. I'd been ignoring IDE features in Emacs for years, thinking I didn't need them, but I have to admit they're a luxury I don't want to give up.
link
zkry 303 days ago
And I have to say that the whole trope of "Emacs may be able to do anything but you have to configure a lot to get it to work" has has got to be pure exaggeration at this point with things like eglot. I had the most painless experience setting up LSP for Java (among many others).
link
neutronicus 303 days ago
It is in fact pretty true with C++.

Getting everything set up for jump to definition and find references to work with an existing code base ... can be a journey.

If you are at a Visual Studio / XCode shop (where these things have been set up and work) you will definitely be swimming against the stream trying to get emacs to "speak" that codebase.

link
writebetterc 303 days ago
Same, Emacs is improving at a rapid rate thanks to its adoption of LSP and Tree-Sitter. Performance is very good, but the async story needs to become better.
link
jackcviers3 303 days ago
Same. It's easy to setup and use. As is gptel, aidermacs, and claude code ide.
link
jjrh 303 days ago
It's the muscle memory. I tried really hard to use things like vs code that do a lot of things better (or at least more automatically) and always end up more efficient in emacs.

Hopefully emacs can catch up.

link