Darwin Wu has an interesting post on the pros and cons of Emacs. I disagree with some of his conclusions but he does a good job of presenting a balanced view. As for the disagreements, I don’t say I’m right and he’s wrong, only that I disagree. You should read the post and make up your own mind.
His list of pros is:
- It’s fast
- Has a large number of packages
- You can Navigate from the keyboard but don’t have to
- Multiple files in a single frame
As most of you know by now, I’m all in on Emacs but I wouldn’t list “fast” as one of its strengths. The fact that Wu does makes me wonder what Atom and VS Code are like. I’ve always assumed that their architecture would make them a bit sluggish but they must be worse than I thought if they make Emacs look fast.
The other pro that I strongly disagree with is that Wu thinks it silly to have packages that allow you to do things like email in Emacs. I’m a live-in-Emacs guy and my complaint would be that I can’t do enough in Emacs. But again, different strokes for different folks.
His list of cons is:
- High learning curve
- The extensive customizability makes pair programming difficult
- Documentation is scattered about and some of it is out of date
- Too many package repositories
It’s true, of course, that mastering Emacs can take years but I’m a bit skeptical that becoming proficient with Emacs is much harder than any other editor, especially if you make use of the menus.
As for making it hard to pair program, my thoughts are best left unstated in case there are children present. I can’t imagine why anyone would care—even a little—about this.
I don’t understand his concern about documentation. There’s a lot of it, of course, but it’s all right there in Emacs. I’ve always considered documentation one of Emacs’ strengths. I’m also a bit confused about his concern that there are too many package repositories. Org-mode has its own—although it’s also available from elpa.gnu.org—but other than that there’s really only elpa.gnu and Melpa (I don’t think Marmalade is still active). As for elpa.gnu being the single source of truth, that’s laughable. I get almost all my packages from Melpa and so does everyone else I know.
I did a lot of carping in this post but Wu’s post is good and will probably be useful for those trying to decide if they want to take the plunge. As I said, read it and see what you think.