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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

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197 points hpaone | 1 comments | 14 Oct 25 20:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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. skydhash ◴[21 Oct 25 11:56 UTC] No.45654749[source]▶
Emacs isn’t battery-included. It’s a platform for textual interfaces with a focus on text editing. It may not includes some tools, but if the tools works with text (at least on the standard in/out) hooking it in emacs can be done really quickly. More so if it’s something that:

- have result that can be formatted in a tabular fashion

- do stuff with files then present some diagnostics (especially if errors and warnings are related to the files)

- Have an REPL interface

It’s not preconfigured like VS Code, but it’s much more versatile. Cursor having to fork VSCode is one such example. In Emacs, anything is just another package.