Over at the Emacs subreddit, MoreHugs is gnashing his teeth and beating his brow over the fact that the Emacs UI is not pretty enough for some users and thus inhibits uptake. Why, he wonders, can’t Emacs have a nice modern UI like Light-Table or SublimeText 2? Really, this is almost as annoying as the non-Lispers complaining about all those parentheses.
I love Emacs and don’t understand why everyone doesn’t use it but, as I’ve said before, the choice of an editor is a personal matter and no one else’s business. That said, if your reason for not using Emacs is that the UI isn’t pretty enough then as far as I’m concerned you’re not a serious person and we have nothing more to discuss1.
Use Emacs or don’t use it. Use whatever editor makes you happy and productive but for goodness sake, make your choice on something more important than how “pretty” the UI looks. People who do that are the same type of people who would choose a nice looking sports car for working the farm.
Vivek Haldar, who’s thought about these matters in some depth, put it best:
What I don’t understand is: why should you ever care how your editor
looks, unless you’re trying to win a screenshot competition? The
primary factor in looking good should be the choice of a good font at
a comfortable size, and a syntax coloring theme that you like.
I use Emacs because it gives me power—including the power to add missing functionality to make my life easier. I don’t care about tabbed displays, menus, or fancy buttons. And I certainly don’t care about a pretty interface. It’s a text editor for crying out loud.
Update: Added link to original reddit post.
Footnotes:
1 Strong words? They’re not nearly as intemperate as what I originally wrote.
To each his own I guess. For me emacs’s lack of UI is *THE BEST FEATURE*. With nice TWM you can have two monitors full of nothing but text. No distractions, nothing. You live in text :P And that’s awesome.
I don’t know if it’s Emacs’ best feature but I certainly agree that it’s a huge win. Like you, I love that there’s nothing on the screen to distract you from the text you’re working on.
Thank you for saving me a bunch of time and energy! I read the title of that reddit post in my feed reader and immediately started mentally composing a rant. Thankfully you wrote precisely my thoughts, so I am absolved! Back to thinking about ponies and rainbows!
Agreed, but it would be very nice if emacs had a more powerful rendering system. Would love to see the ability to inline html (embedded webkit?) instead of just images/text. Granted, that wouldn’t work for console windows, but that’s already the case for images.
And math, for that matter – just today I was thinking that it’d be quite cool to have a real-time preview (say, in another window) of rendered formulae in AUCTeX. It can be done with images, of course, but MathML could make it much easier and faster. And looking at complicated formulae in (La)TeX syntax can be a real pain, even when they’re fontified. (And I say that after almost 20 years of using TeX and 10+ years of using Emacs, just in case someone thinks it’s a n00b whining again;).)