My disapointment with Emacs.

· July 10, 2020

I have been trying to use emacs for a while now. I really like the idea of the editor being something of an extendable IDE. Despite my eagerness to give it a shot, I have significantly been disappointed so far.

I love IDEs

I am a massive fan of IDEs, I am an enormous shill for JetBrains, and I believe anything they make is nothing short of gold. As a result of this, I have never seriously considered emacs as an environment for proper development, and never bothered configuring it. The defaults from the various ‘python-modes’ and the ‘go-modes’ coupled with doom emacs are pretty good, but I know I can never beat a JetBrains product’s brilliance.

What I need is a pain to set up.

At the end of the day, emacs is a text editor and not an IDE. So, if I were to use it for writing, I would want it to have prose linting, grammar checks, and the whole lot, but, unfortunately, having a sane setup for this was a pain. The productivity boost while using something like a Grammarly or a Hemmingway seems like a far more efficient way of writing prose.

Epilogue

I have not yet given up on emacs. I am excited by the extensibility of emacs due to it being a big old lisp IDE. It’s just that I have yet to feel any of the profits of switching to it. Maybe one day, I shall subscribe to the teachings of Saint Ignutius.

PS: Vim was never in the picture. I don’t get Vim’s philosophy.

Twitter, Facebook