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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

What do the graphical environments gain you, in most cases? I'll not argue that they don't usually have better defaults configured. Autocomplete, in particular, typically works out of the box. These can work in emacs, though. (Even in vim, to be honest.)

Seems most of them "win" by having more effective advocacy than they do more effective features.

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A tree view of the bazillion files in the typical Java project. (of course, if the project wasn't organized as one file per "design pattern" + domain part, each file of which has 1 or 2 executable lines nested within the required ritual...)

As well as a tree view of the properties and methods of the handful of "god classes" within said projects.

But seriously, on the plus side, IntelliJ is actually fairly usable in that you can quickly toggle on and off the supplemental info panels and just use the "distraction free" editor panel, particularly with the vim (key map) plugin (don't know if there's an emacs plugin).

I think Steve Yegge had a comment in one of his rants that IDEs have better support for languages that require IDEs :-)

There are tree views in emacs. Looks like the most popular is https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NeoTree.

Pretty sure I have seen similar things written for class views. I had one that was interactive view of javap's output. I liked that one pretty well. (I'm partial to anything that is just an interactive version of an existing cmd line.)

>What do the graphical environments gain you

Simplicity. In my IDE, I start it up and then program.

With emacs, it always felt like I spent a lot of time curating the editor. Part of that was because customizing emacs is fun--I have this big .emacs file that imports an even bigger .elisp file--but I also always seemed to be referring to some documentation because I'd forgotten that particular set of key-chords or messing with something to get it to work.

I've come to prefer simplicity. In fact, after years of using emacs, I switched to vim for the moments when I want to program on the command line. (I think my only customization in VIM is mapping jj to escape)

I like IntelliJ, but I still spend time here and there window-shopping the settings and plugins. That seems to be the nature of things, regardless of the tool.

In case this helps anyone else, I've found that a better shortcut for me is Ctrl+[ , which actually maps to escape too. I too found having to tap escape to exit modes was annoying since I had to make my fingers leave the home row and there is no need to customize mapping in this case.

If you're used to hitting ctrl with your left pinky, which is necessary for us emacsers, then Ctrl+[ will be 100x better than hitting escape.

Take a look at what the Smalltalkers are up to these days, with custom visualisations for different classes:

http://gtoolkit.org/

I don't know how useful this is in practice, and it's not representative of what IDEs for mainstream languages are doing, but it's pretty cool.

You hit my fundamental problem. Specifically, "how useful this is in practice."

It makes for some awesome demos. But... so does https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEcobuYr5wg. I'm just not sure how practical this is.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes, I do want to boot into IDEA for some of the refactor tools. If I truly used them enough, though, I would write one for myself in emacs.

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