I Hate Emacs | Hacker News Reader

I Hate Emacs

danielfm.me

Yes. I too got sucked into org mode, and now struggle with the lack of android tools I can live with. Syncthing and termux/Emacs may be where I wind up.

The irony of being a persisting (n)vi user since BSD4.1 1982 is not lost on me.

I think that a lot of this springs from the concept of "do it all" app, even one or more with entirely open data, like the author mentions.

Everything I have tried has gone or transformed, going back to wordmaster and zoomracks (I remember when Apple settled with them, presumably for HyperCard and then killed off HyperCard)

Integration level? zero.

I hate myself for wasting a huge chunk of my professional life without ever knowing what Emacs was, and I deeply regret never bothering to learn it sooner.

Emacs is what truly taught me the importance of dominating control over text on every level, not only on the composition side (writing, editing, revising), but on the consumption side as well. I'm reading this thread inside it, just like I'm writing this comment in it.

This unsurprisingly come to be enormously consequential in the age of LLMs. I can type a question anytime, anywhere and send it to an agent. I can select a paragraph and ask to summarize it, fact-check it, fix mistakes, re-word it, ask for multiple variants of rephrased text. I can do it in the middle of typing a Slack message, a code comment, function name, git commit, pdf annotation, shell command in the terminal, etc.

I control video playback directly from it. I can read through the transcript and play it "karaoke style"; I can move the cursor and it forwards and rewinds to that exact point in the video. I can take a snapshot of an area of my screen and it can OCR the text out of it. I can point to a piece of text that looks like rfc3560 and immediately browse the damn document, right there. I can do the same with Jira tickets - point to a piece of text and fetch all the related PRs.

Anyone who tries to compare Emacs to any other "text editor" or IDE has no clue that Emacs is not a fucking text editor. It is a damn text orchestrator. Most people, even majority of Emacs users are clueless of what it is capable of.

These days, it can even handle Doom-level graphics at 60fps. Yup, not a damn "text editor", I'm telling ya'll.

Emacs being much more than a text editor is not in dispute. However, by binding some workflows to it hurts portability, at least in my experience.

How do you handle this?

What portability you're talking about? Managing your notes on another device (phone, tablet)? There are apps - orgzly revived, beorg, orgro, org note. Yes, of course they won't get you the complete org-mode-in-emacs experience, but asking for that outside of Emacs is like saying: "I love AK-47, you can literally drag it through the mud and it still works, you can bury it in desert, dig it up months later, and it still be shooting. But I don't like that I can't use the same rounds on my Uzi, which so much more compact and airline-friendly..."

Why? I see no problem with it?

If you click on the header you'll find it links to an article that provides context for the title. Ask your LLM of choice to summarize the article for you if it's too much to read.

Nothing of what the author is complaining about is a problem specifically for Emacs, other than his own complicated "AI" setup.

It is very more likely a skill issue for him.

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