Emacs I like you but...



I enjoy using Emacs. It is an editor that I find quite relaxing to use. Yes it takes a bit of setting up. Yes I know about the Emacs "Distributions" but find them a little over the tops for what I want.

So eventually I settled on a few customizations involving Evil mode, projectile and a few others. It is nice, not perfect. I tend to use Emacs over Vim as Emacs has OrgMode and a few other niceties. I like the idea my editor can show images. Plus there is Evil mode so you can still have Vim in Emacs

But the world moves. Great cross platform support for editors is now a common. Emacs port to windows should be show casing the application instead I suffer from stall and freezes. It has reached the point where if I try to code in Rust, Haskell or C++ in Emacs it is a frustrating experience. Perhaps it is the language server providing me the auto completions. I don't know and honestly I don't want to know. I just want it fast.

Now I have not seen these problems on Linux but perhaps I have not used Emacs enough on Linux to be sure.

So I like Emacs but you are but you are not great anymore, Clion/VS Code are taking over when I write C++ or Rust. Even if they take up 5 times more memory and drain my laptop battery a little faster, it an acceptable trade off.

Now I appreciate it could be the plugins I have installed but honestly I am not using anything considered niche. I guess I would like to see Emacs advance by providing more at install time. Emacs should ship with a great customizable completion engine, and then ship with rock solid Language server support. Keep the ability to do other methods as well.

Emacs should probably ship with an equivalent of projectile along with the ability to search across all files. It is not hard to add these but you are never sure if you are getting the right project mode, one is one that will work with your other systems. Or are these in Emacs and I don't  know about them. Provide them in the core feature set and work to make Emacs great out of the box.

Write these things in C and make them really fast and robust.

I know the Emacs way is to allow the community to provide things but my feeling is Emacs is going to slip more and more into obscurity. It is hard for me to suggest people learn it. Well I would suggest learning Vim and try out a few other editors with Vim emulation to see if you like them.

Oh and if you write C++ just use CLion and save yourself a lot pain.

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