Posted by signa11 17 hours ago
> This is largely a discoverability problem
In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit. My problem with emacs batteries has always been stability between different combinations of packages. I know how to use dired, I know how to install elisp packages, I know how to write emacs lisp myself. The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large packages with "batteries" because any additional package added can bork some random, seemingly unrelated package. E.g. back in the day (maybe around ~2020s or a bit before?) I've been using Spacemacs without vim keybinding, and although batteries were included and I was happy, this issue I mentioned above was even bigger. Because I constantly had to deal with installing a package and discovering that it broke some unrelated LSP, programming, or autocomplete package. It gets quite a bit frustrating at some point. Since this LLM madness started, I never really installed anything LLM related to Emacs, and have been using other text editor for LLM related stuff, Emacs for everything else (especially if there is a strong Emacs package, e.g. agda2-mode is incredibly good, almost flawless!)
Again, just my humble two cents. Obvious Emacs is amazing, and in many ways it's still my go-to, I just think that the biggest issue for me has always been randomly broken packages. Maybe I'm a terrible elisp programmer, that's possible! But I've been using emacs everyday for decades, so idk...
[1] and they do break!
And diagnose and fix up my emacs configuration.
Even back in pre-Opus 4.5 days I found them incredibly useful for elisp diagnostics, and these days I use Codex to great effect to enhance my emacs setup.
People holding your attitude is one thing that keeps people away from Emacs. Very few people want to get into the weeds of customizing their editor. They want to do whatever it is they are interested in and the editor is tool to get it done. Doom Emacs, and other approachable "distributions" are the way to make the power of Emacs accessible.
I heard a similar argument about vim's billion configuration options.
At some point I simply got tired of having to tweak it and switched to a better editor (not emacs though; both vim and emacs are losing in any debate, but it's a fun debate nonetheless since both camps think software can only be written with these two editors; everyone else must be clueless and skillless).
The distribution style packages for these editors make the user skip all that initial learning and discovery. It leads to people writing plugins and packages that simply replicate what was already possible. I have written plenty of elisp myself only to find out I was rewriting builtin functionality.
I'd also say that both editors are fully discoverable but you have to first learn how to use the various help available. Emacs is a bit ahead here with its help options, letting you search for functions, variables, info and man pages, apropos (fuzzy search) and more.
In short start vanilla and explore; this kind of blog really helps with that.