Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

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Here are things listed in the article that one can do in Emacs [0]:

- process their email inbox

- communicate in chat

- navigate the web

- write code

- prose

- Creating a to-do item for something your partner just asked you (while you were concentrated on a task) that will show up automatically on your agenda tomorrow

- Converting some text notes you quickly scribbled down into a beautiful PDF via LaTeX, uploading it to S3, and referencing the URL in a reworded existing git commit message?

I could make the list much longer from my own experience, but this is just straight from the article.

I'm not a VSCode user, but I often hear about it only in a programming context, so it always surprises me when people suggest ditching Emacs to use VSCode.[1] I'm genuinely curious: How many of the above tasks are doable in VSCode? If not most of them, then I suggest people stop comparing the two programs - there is no point in asking people to stop using Emacs and use something that doesn't do what is needed.

If VSCode can do it, I'd love to look up the plugins/extensions needed.

[0] And many, many do it. I do over half of these things in Emacs (and most of the last item).

[1] Easily over 70% of my Emacs usage has nothing to do with programming.

> [0] And many, many do it. I do over half of these things in Emacs (and most of the last item).

And very probably, many, many, many more don't. (This is what telemetry is good for--actually telling you how many people use various functionality in your product). Somewhat more than half of my coworkers use emacs for their daily coding, and exactly 0 of them use it for anything other than a programming editor.

And that's fine, and I would not really recommend Emacs to them (although it's OK if they want to use it). Emacs is a very good programming editor, but it's not in that arena that it shines and the alternatives may be as good if not better.

My point is that while I know many, many folks who use Linux only for SW development (at work), it would be silly to view Linux primarily as a SW development environment when it can be used for so much more. And so it is with Emacs. It's like saying "I dropped Linux for Visual Studio." The comparison makes little sense, unless you're talking to the folks who only use Linux for a small thing.

As for telemetry, I can again invoke the Linux analogy. While it would certainly be nice to get an accurate poll of what people use Linux for, I don't think many kernel developers will want to drop multimedia features from it because less than 10% of Linux users use those features (10% is really optimistic!). Emacs is an elisp development environment, and a text environment. Anything that works with these two is within its scope. It's a valid discussion on what should come bundled with Emacs vs off loaded to external packages, but that's not the discussion over here.

(Yes, yes I'm aware that Linus and the kernel folks do often drop features because they believe it's not used often, but those usually are way, way down the tail of the distribution).

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