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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

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197 points hpaone | 8 comments | 14 Oct 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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. teddyh ◴[21 Oct 25 09:16 UTC] No.45653935[source]▶
Why not instead blame Windows for not having the standard tools “grep” and “find”?
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2. positron26 ◴[21 Oct 25 09:33 UTC] No.45654004[source]▶
The criticism makes sense when you consider that yeah, while posix tools are okay, needing them everywhere means you have something wrong in your programming ecosystem, and Elisp has many things wrong.
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3. mickeyp ◴[21 Oct 25 10:37 UTC] No.45654337[source]▶
Emacs can easily work with non-posix tools. Many people use ag, ripgrep, or ack in lieu of grep. You change the command string Emacs uses for finding and grepping to your tool of choice.
4. pjmlp ◴[21 Oct 25 12:26 UTC] No.45654956[source]▶
UNIX standard tools, and not every operating system is supposed to be a UNIX clone.

There are ways to search and grep files on Windows.

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5. teddyh ◴[21 Oct 25 17:38 UTC] No.45658834[source]▶
Feel free to add the code to use something else by default on Windows: <https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/p...>
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6. pjmlp ◴[21 Oct 25 19:03 UTC] No.45660144{3}[source]▶
Why should I bother, when I share James Gosling opinion regarding using Emacs on the 21st century?

https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/dont-use-emacs-says-jav...

Given that was in 2008, I would update his remark from Netbeans, to any of JetBrains products, Eclipse or whatever.

In any case, you can get those features using Windows Resource Toolkit on the old days, a mix of findstr and other similar improvements on Windows NT linage, nowadays Powershell will be enough.

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7. teddyh ◴[21 Oct 25 21:46 UTC] No.45662127{4}[source]▶
He’s probabaly just salty that his commercial Emacs clone for Unix (with its terrible not-quite-Lisp extension language) never took off.
8. jhbadger ◴[22 Oct 25 12:25 UTC] No.45667991{4}[source]▶
Calling Gosling "the father of Emacs" is pretty inaccurate. What Gosling did was create the first UNIX version of Emacs, and while that predates RMS' GNU Emacs, Emacs was originally a series of macros created by RMS for the TECO editor running on ITS (Emacs originally meant "editor macros"), so RMS is clearly the father of Emacs.