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Comment by travv0 | Hacker News Reader

> "a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor"

That joke seems to imply a perfect understanding that it's more than a text editor. It is, however, referred to as "The Emacs Editor" in its documentation and "an extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor — and more" on its official website, which could lead to some confusion about its primary purpose if that's not editing text. I do begrudgingly use Emacs as my main editor because that's what the communities of the languages I like use, but I do find the editing experience to be sub-par compared to other editors I've worked with, and I find that there are better external alternatives to any of the common elisp applications, barring org-mode.

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The thing is that editing/text-navigation modes are so universally useful that it makes perfect sense to make a supposed “OS-level” text editor. How many plugins, extensions, etc. are there so that people can use Vim bindings in web browsers, IDEs, the window manager, etc.?

I use evil-mode and that has alleviated any complaints I had about the editing experience. But then again, the modal nature of vi is how I think about editing text.

I use evil-mode as well.

I generally agree with your statement, but the primary thing that prevents me from switching to a more modern editor is counsel/ivy. I really wish that VS Code or others offered a similar experience of filtering a buffer/project so quickly and easily. The editing experience of Evil with ivy is fantastic.

I just wish that things like autocomplete or debugging were easier to get right across languages...

The whole point of Emacs is: you get to change whatever you don't like. Furthermore, why use Emacs as an IDE if you don't like it? Who cares what editor you use? Unless you use Emacs, then they make fun of you for using it, while relying on your efficient text processing skills to do refactoring.

I care that the editor I use has good support for the language I’m writing, so, like I explained in my post, I use Emacs since that’s where the language’s community puts their effort. Also, to address your first sentence, the things I don’t like about Emacs can’t be fixed by writing a bit of elisp.

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