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Comment by BaculumMeumEst | Hacker News Reader

people actually like their editor? blasphemy. you must be using either sublime or kakoune

I do! The one here is BBEdit which you can extend by writing - ready for this? - command line programs. It didn’t come with a built-in JavaScript formatted, so I wrote a shell script that runs Prettier on its input, and told BBEdit to run that script when I hit F1. Voila. JavaScript formatting. It’s also incredibly fast and responsive.

If I can’t get it working to write Python the way I want, I’m going back to Emacs. It’s not a “native” Mac app, but doesn’t fall into the uncanny valley the way things like VSCode do.

I've been down that path with both Acme and Kakoune, although I went with separate formatting scripts based on whatever seemed to work best for each language. But I started to go a little insane trying to extend those editors, because I realized that I hate working with the shell and prefer to avoid working with it at all cost. And so back to Emacs I went. And now I oscillate between repeatedly poking my config with a stick, and trying to force myself to migrate to VS Code.

I switched from Emacs to VSCode for a while, but couldn’t stick with it. It’s soooo easy to set up and start using, and it does the right thing 99% of the time. However, that 1% drove me nuts. I don’t remember the specifics, just that there were a few things that bugged the everliving hell out of me, and they couldn’t be changed without doing some significant work inside VSCode itself and then in its extensions.

The worst thing about Emacs is how it absolutely spoils everything else. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck at times, but you can change anything you want.

That said, BBEdit got far closer to my platonic ideal editor than VSCode ever did, and it’s nice enough in other ways to win me over.

Haha, yes, virtually all of that has been my experience as well, except substituting BBEdit for Sublime. I'm still convinced that just sucking it up and sticking with VS Code is the way to go, I just can't make it stick.

But Emacs is still alluring enough that I spent like 4 hours over the last few days trying to get clangd to work in a project that involves cross compiling C++ in a way where generating compile_commands.json does not seem possible, with no success, even with the help of clangd contributors, where VS code somehow is able to just work with minimal configuration of the C/C++ extension. Someday I will stop doing this to myself, hopefully.

My yesterday looked a lot like that. Well, if I can't get BBEdit to work like I'd like, guess it's time to dust off my Emacs config and modernize it. Once more into the breach!

If you figure out how to stop this, please let me know.

supreme blasphemy. Emacs

you just have a call to (stockholm-syndrome) buried somewhere in your 1200 line init file

The amount of Emacs configuration I had was what drove me to the insanity of writing my own editor....

(xkcd-get 297)

https://xkcd.com/297/

https://github.com/vibhavp/emacs-xkcd

Parenthesis are flying like god's edition… ;D

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