{"id":8201,"date":"2019-07-27T11:23:19","date_gmt":"2019-07-27T15:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8201"},"modified":"2019-07-27T11:23:19","modified_gmt":"2019-07-27T15:23:19","slug":"the-pros-and-cons-of-emacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8201","title":{"rendered":"The Pros and Cons of Emacs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Darwin Wu has an interesting post on <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@darwin67\/being-an-emacs-user-in-2019-pros-and-cons-28a9e58480e4\">the pros and cons of Emacs<\/a>. I disagree with some of his conclusions but he does a good job of presenting a balanced view. As for the disagreements, I don\u2019t say I\u2019m right and he\u2019s wrong, only that I disagree. You should read the post and make up your own mind.<\/p>\n<p>His list of pros is:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"org-ul\">\n<li>It\u2019s fast<\/li>\n<li>Has a large number of packages<\/li>\n<li>You can Navigate from the keyboard but don\u2019t have to<\/li>\n<li>Multiple files in a single frame<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As most of you know by now, I\u2019m all in on Emacs but I wouldn\u2019t list \u201cfast\u201d as one of its strengths. The fact that Wu does makes me wonder what Atom and VS Code are like. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019m a live-in-Emacs guy and my complaint would be that I can\u2019t do <i>enough<\/i> in Emacs. But again, different strokes for different folks.<\/p>\n<p>His list of cons is:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"org-ul\">\n<li>High learning curve<\/li>\n<li>The extensive customizability makes pair programming difficult<\/li>\n<li>Documentation is scattered about and some of it is out of date<\/li>\n<li>Too many package repositories<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It\u2019s true, of course, that <i>mastering<\/i> Emacs can take years but I\u2019m a bit skeptical that becoming proficient with Emacs is much harder than any other editor, especially if you make use of the menus.<\/p>\n<p>As for making it hard to pair program, my thoughts are best left unstated in case there are children present. I can\u2019t imagine why anyone would care\u2014even a little\u2014about this.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t understand his concern about documentation. There\u2019s a lot of it, of course, but it\u2019s all right there in Emacs. I\u2019ve always considered documentation one of Emacs\u2019 strengths. I\u2019m also a bit confused about his concern that there are too many package repositories. Org-mode has its own\u2014although it\u2019s also available from elpa.gnu.org\u2014but other than that there\u2019s really only elpa.gnu and Melpa (I don\u2019t think Marmalade is still active). As for elpa.gnu being the single source of truth, that\u2019s laughable. I get almost all my packages from Melpa and so does everyone else I know.<\/p>\n<p>I did a lot of carping in this post but Wu\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019t say I\u2019m right &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=8201\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-8201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8202,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8201\/revisions\/8202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}