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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

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197 points hpaone | 5 comments | 14 Oct 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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billfruit ◴[21 Oct 25 08:31 UTC] No.45653702[source]▶
While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration.

Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.

If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.

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1. internet_points ◴[21 Oct 25 08:54 UTC] No.45653816[source]▶
I don't think lsp servers should be bundled, they're often huge, and e.g. for haskell you need the one that matches your ghc version, so you'd need ..all of them? and they need to be kept up-to-date etc. There is an emacs LSP server package manager at https://github.com/deirn/mason.el though – maybe something like that could be included, and Emacs could suggest how to install an appropriate LSP server (and enable eglot). I know many of the old hackers bristle at this, but I think it should be possible to do some kind of helpful but non-intrusive hinting for new users (one can always `setq clippy nil`)

They could at least change the default theme to one of the already-bundled modus-themes or something.

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2. billfruit ◴[21 Oct 25 09:18 UTC] No.45653942[source]▶
Once we get a modern IDE like PyCharm or Intellij Idea, the auto complete is essentially built in, without needing to deal with installing LSP servers, clients, and their dependencies.

Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.

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3. worthless-trash ◴[21 Oct 25 09:22 UTC] No.45653957[source]▶
Except pycharm won't work with my erlang lsp.
4. internet_points ◴[21 Oct 25 09:33 UTC] No.45654005[source]▶
Last I checked, an IDE like Android Studio (based on IDEA) needs to download a hogshead of java before it can even begin to build anything. And if you switch compiler versions, it needs to download even more. Sure it makes installing java as easy as clicking a few buttons, and it'd be great if Emacs made it as easy, but still: it doesn't bundle every version. No one would have the drive space for that. And now consider that emacs has support for not just java/kotlin, but pretty much every programming language in existence..
5. binary132 ◴[21 Oct 25 15:14 UTC] No.45656856[source]▶
Emacs is not a “modern IDE” and expecting it to be one is a recipe for not only confusion and irritation but also for watering down the goodness that it really is.