[stackghost]

I guess if one's hobby is fiddling with emacs, then I could see why learning edebug and the profiler are valuable first steps. But I view emacs as merely a tool to get vastly more important work done. I just want it to stay out of my way.

I have been using emacs for 20 years and never heard of edebug before today, and have never used the profiler. If I install some new package and it doesn't immediately work, I usually uninstall it right away. I don't have time to fuck around. I would rather chew glass than debug breaking changes in my init.el so I make changes rarely, and deliberately. To each their own, I suppose.

[iLemming]

> I would rather chew glass

So, you're making assumptions even without ever trying? You just decided it's hard/time consuming/worthless even though you have "never heard" about it?

> I have been using emacs for 20 years

Yeah, well. Like I said: Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter, "using Emacs" actually means dealing with Lisp. To what extent - it's everyone's own choice. I have seen too many stories of people like you - "using" it for decades and then abandoning it for VSCode or other things, without even realizing what they've given up.

It only takes just a bit of knowing the basics of Elisp to get the genuine Emacs experience, otherwise, you're just riding the car, not driving it.

> I don't have time to fuck around

That is a big misconception. Prolific Emacs users don't waste time ricing their setup just for the sake of it. They apply Lisp to meet their needs. My own work demands certain changes every single day - I have to move between different projects, in different PLs, dissimilar teams; I poke into various APIs; consume data in all sorts of formats; build prototypes, every time with different scope and requirements; analyze huge sets of data; search through documents, hop between different hosts, etc. I can only imagine how miserable my life would've been without my Lisp tools, where Emacs invariably takes the center stage.

It seems like you lack the notion of what it's like to literally shape your tools for your needs as they evolve. It's like having an entire pottery workshop at your disposal, but choosing to only pick up the already finished, dried pieces. Seriously, don't be daft - hook up an AI assistant to your config, the possibilities are virtually endless. It could be just about anything - any small annoyance that you may decide to improve in your workflow. I wish I had developed this "emacs/hacker mindset" where I don't even think twice, if something feels suboptimal - I'd try to automate it. I'd just start typing some Elisp in my scratch buffer. These days, it has gotten even simpler than that - I'd just type a prompt.

[stackghost]

>You just decided it's hard/time consuming/worthless even though you have "never heard" about it?

You must mave misread what I wrote, because you're conflating two different statements.

>I have to move between different projects, in different PLs, dissimilar teams; I poke into various APIs; consume data in all sorts of formats

None of this requires elisp beyond the use-package incantations to install a given mode, which is only done a single time.

>It seems like you lack the notion of what it's like to literally shape your tools for your needs as they evolve.

My needs are already mostly satisfied by emacs. It is excellent at editing and composing text out of the box already. I have language servers for auto-completion. I have syntax highlighting. If I am mangling a text file I use the build in transient macro recording feature.

The editor itself is almost never the bottleneck in my work. Elisp is so unpleasant that I have zero desire to hack around in it for fun.

[iLemming]

> I have zero desire to hack around in it for fun

You just sit here stiff-necked without even the slightest clue of what I'm talking about. I don't hack for "fun", I hack with a purpose. Here's a practical anecdote. I was pair programming with Matthew over Zoom and he was showing me certain things. He would navigate to different sites, switch between terminal and his editor, run some scripts etc. I just couldn't bear interrupting him all the time saying, "hey, hey, hey, slow down, please. I'm trying to take notes here... Hey, can you share this link?...", etc. So that bothered me for a minute. I sacrificed my lunch break, sat down and figured that out. I wrote a tiny function that checks if the last thing in the clipboard is an image and sends it to tesseract CLI for OCRing. Took me not even fifteen minutes. Now I can just select an area of my screen (with Flameshot), and the text pops into an Emacs buffer.

This feature never existed - not in a package, not in anyone's config on GitHub. It's a specific problem that I quickly solved for my own needs. Could I have done this with Python, Bash, or AWK? Sure, why not? The thing is - before Emacs distilled this mindset into me, I wouldn't even have bothered about it. It wouldn't be a bottleneck I would ever think of noticing. And that is just a single example of hundreds of different things Emacs helps me with. Anything text-related invariably ends up being routed through Emacs, and majority of programmers have little idea how empowering this could be. I consume much of the content through Emacs - I read HN threads in Emacs. Also Slack, Reddit, Jira, my browser history and other things. This very comment is being typed in Emacs.

I have seen both of these worlds. You are sharing just one side of it, of which I am very familiar. So why don't you take my word for it and give it a try, instead of arguing that the side (you have never even experienced) is not worth your attention? What do you have to lose anyway?

[stackghost]

>So why don't you take my word for it and give it a try, instead of arguing that the side (you have never even experienced) is not worth your attention?

Because you're being too aggressive and unpleasant

>What do you have to lose anyway?

Time spent on more important things

[iLemming]

> Because you're being too aggressive and unpleasant

Huh. Well, I guess, fair enough. Would be weird for me to assert that I don't feel like it. What could I say in my defense? Jesus tried to spread the word nicely, have you heard what happened to him later? :)

> Time spent on more important things

There are a bunch of things I had to learn over the years. Three things I have never, not once, ever regretted spending some time getting familiar with - Linux, Vim-navigation and Lisp. All three grand ideas have a profound compounding effect on my workflow. Turns out, later you'd carry regret not for trying random things, but for things you have never tried. I do to a certain degree regret chasing things that turned out to be ephemeral, but that time doesn't feel exactly wasted. The only genuine regret I still carry - I wish I had someone in my life to urge me to try learning these things sooner. I do absolutely regret the time wasted. All three taught me a great deal of wisdom, and I wish I did it when I was much younger.