As you can tell from the title, this is the rawest of red meat. The title comes from a post on reddit by BlackberryPerfect938 entitled Why Emacs Sucks. On the one hand, what else is new? Plenty of people try Emacs and decide they don’t like it—nothing wrong with that. There’s also the fact that after a while, the editor wars become boring. Still, it’s worth taking a look at BlackberryPerfect938’s arguments.
His major complaint, as I understand it, is that Emacs “feels old”. The reasons he thinks it feels old are:
- There are a lot of external packages that implement modes with overlapping and sometimes conflicting functionality with built-in modes.
- Many times these external packages implement capabilities that—BlackberryPerfect938 feels—should be built in. He gives LSP as an example that he finds particularly annoying.
- Emacs is “distracting”. He gives, the admittedly enjoyable, desire to tinker with your configuration as one example, and the existence of games as another.
- Legacy keybindings.
- The Emacs community consists mostly of “old folk” such as technical people, scientists, and professors.
You probably don’t need Irreal to call BS on those complaints but here at Irreal we live to serve so we will anyway.
- This is just an example of how Emacs can be configured or extended by anyone to meet their specific needs. Often, of course, others find those customizations/extensions useful so they’re made available to all through one of the repositories.
- This is Emacs evolution is action. Someone will write a useful package that gets used by more and more Emacers. Eventually, when the usefulness is confirmed, the package may get absorbed into Emacs core. Org-mode is an example of this.
- No one is forced to use any of the games. I don’t but they’re there if you want them. How is this a problem? The constant tweaking of your Emacs configuration just means that users adjust the editor as their needs change.
- No complaint about Emacs would be complete without whining about the editor not following the CUA bindings that came years after Emacs was introduced. And, of course, the complaints always forget to mention that a single line of configuration will, in fact, enable those CUA bindings.
- This seems to me to be the most bizarre of the complaints. It boils down to “People who are experienced and knowledgeable tend to use Emacs. Those who are younger and lack that experience do not.” Therefore…. It just doesn’t make sense.
The commenters were not kind to BlackberryPerfect938 as you can see by following the link. As I’ve said many times, there are plenty of reasons not to use Emacs but BlackberryPerfect938’s post doesn’t give any of them.