Comment by ftlio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ftlio | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience, most IDE users don’t know that Emacs is effectively an IDE that can do all of the same things, and even more. When you show them, then the complaint is that it’s a hassle to configure, and I don’t really know what to do with that. I like configuring my text editor.

I’ve worked with tools my entire life and the main difference between Emacs / VI and other IDEs is they’re tools you can hone infinitely and truly make an extension of your mind, as opposed to IDEs which more fit the “choose the best tool for the job” mentality, which I appreciate, but does not apply to text editing to me because of how Emacs / VI shifted my mindset.

Emacs still feels 1000x more modern to me than any IDE, especially VS Code. And I agree that text editing / better IDEs really are not the problem in software development.

> In my experience, most IDE users don’t know that Emacs is effectively an IDE that can do all of the same things, and even more

A programmable editor can, by programming (and in many cases, this means using modules others have programmed) become a Development Environment both more powerful and more adapted to your particular use than any available Integrated Development Environment, but it's not an IDE because no vendor integrated it for you (though sometimes, rather than collecting small modules of your own, you can get a pre-integrated set of modules for a particular use for a programmable editor, and that is exactly an IDE.)

> Emacs still feels 1000x more modern to me than any IDE, especially VS Code

VS Code, like Emacs, is a programmable editor, not an IDE. (though I guess it's built-in, first party tooling for certain languages makes it a very light IDE for them.)

I program my Emacs for very basic stuff, but very specialized for projects. For other developers (even who use VSCode) it's black magick. I think Emacs has also a culture of tinkering.

> is effectively an IDE

If it's a text editor with an understanding of the code, that also allows debugging, then it's an IDE by definition.

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