I was a bit put off by this tweet:
I know that cool kids don’t use #emacs, but I love it. And also even if the last guide isn’t that complete, it still a fast starting point for those who already know emacs and don’t want to read a full tutorial to setup it for C.
— LIBRENEITOR (@libreneitor) July 2, 2019
The problem isn’t LIBRENEITOR, who is, after all, an enthusiastic Emacs user despite what the cool kids say or do. My problem is with the notion that the “cool kids” don’t use Emacs.
I don’t think it’s true. At least not for any reasonable definition of “cool kids.” But suppose it is true. Who, then, are the cool kids? I submit that by and large they are just like the cool kids in high school who ended up pumping gas after graduation. In modern terms, they are the hipsters. Or to put it a third way, they are unserious people.
If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know what tools I think serious developers prefer. Maybe that’s just because I’m an older developer and don’t know any better but it seems to me that people who wax rhapsodic about editors like VSCode or Atom always say the same thing: “It’s so much prettier than Emacs.” They never claim that they’re more powerful because, of course, they’re not, just that they’re prettier. I agree with Vivek Haldar: “why should you ever care how your editor looks, unless you’re trying to win a screenshot competition?”
Sadly, even Emacs users can be affected by this silliness. Consider this reddit post bemoaning that out-of-the-box Emacs is so ugly. Notice that the complaint isn’t about lack of functionality; it’s about appearance. Experienced Emacs users get rid of as much appearance as they can. They disable the tool bar, the menus, and the scroll bar. They value usable screen real estate over eye candy and they certainly don’t want to have to use the mouse. And by the way, light themes are better; it’s science. You don’t want to be a science denier, do you?
By now many of you probably have a mental image of me waving a cane and yelling at kids to get off my lawn. That’s probably not entirely unjustified but I do wish folks would treat their editors as tools to be valued for their functionality instead of as an extension of their wardrobes.