Re: Time to throw away my love----Emacs?

[steve]

Ding Lei <din...@ipanel.cn> writes:

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> Hello Folks,

Hello!

> I'v been a linux user for around 4 years, experienced varoius mental stages
> on views towards *nix style tools that most of Windows user might did. And
> now, I am basically quite satisfied with my slackware box.

I started using slackware in the late 90's been a while. Really nice -
no nonsense distro.

> I used VI for around 2 years, mainly for doing Java programming, Until
> recently I turned to the Church of Emacs, doing java programming with the help
> of ECB & JDEE.
> Yeah, For emacs, I have to admit that, It's not only a tool for me, not just
> only prefer, but LOVE. I guess most of people here could understand my
> feeling.

A world without grep is a world of python bugs because sed does not come
with windows.

> But ... the world that we live in is no longer the old Unix hacker's days
> (though I did like the culture very much).
> Managers need things be done on time. They definitely won't care which tool
> you use, whether open source or not. Most of my colleagues uses various new
> Fancy stuffs like Eclipse, IDEA, Dreamweaver, and etc, with
> bells & whistles that enables you to get very complex operations done only
> with a few mouse clicks, which might takes me a few hours to do the same thing
> with Emacs.

Use what works for you, if you can. Learning the new stuff always seems
like a waste of time to me. In the world of UNIX I would say, why yet
another tool? Find an existing tool and make it work for you...

> But I don't *really* care, at the start. I often think, one day, there would
> be an Emacs package which could do the samething.(I don't know how to program
> in Emacs Lisp, quite a pitty). .....

I do. What do you want it to do?

> As time goes, I found my productivity more and more behind my colleagues,
> friends. And obviously the manager is quite unsatisified with me.
> I starts to worry... about whether I shall persit to stay in the Emacs
> world along with his friends? or shall I just turn to M$ Windows, and pickup
> cool new things no matter proprietary or not, just as my colleague did
> already?

like I said use what works. If using eclipse works for your task then
use it. It may feel ``wrong'' or uncomfortable. I just started to use
eclipse. With fedora I can run Intel's VTUNE out of the box! This is
some seriously nice software. Having a tool like VTUNE that can really
make people notice small optimizations. Emacs cannot do what vtune does;
that is probably why I use it.

> Yes, emacs can do everything, that's what we emacsen usually says. But, when
> I found my emacs'startup becomes slower & slower, when I found myself doing
> whatever I can just in order to use the same function inside EMACS. I began to
> think ... Emacs seems to be some kind of garbage collector ...
> numerous

I believe they call emacs the kitchen sink.

> functions, add-ons & external program interfaces are added to it, so it
> *seems* that Emacs can do ALMOST everything, but (almost) NONE of them are the
> best. they are usually slow, hard-to-use(or at least not friendly to
> newbies), with lesser functions than their counterparts outside the Emacs
> world.

This is very true. Learning emacs is not easy. It does take some time.

> I'v found the reason of my low productivity, I guess. Everytime when I
> suprisingly found a new emacs package on the net, then I'll try to install
> them, read the Installation Guide, read info Manual, try to learn bunches of
> variables with strange names by heart ... and the process repeats...

If you are new to emacs lisp I would stay away from melpa.

> Above are just my very personal view on Emacs, anyway, I still love it. Any
> comments & critics are welcome.

Ah! a discussion!