I talked to someone about the extensibility of emacs, but the person I was speaking to assumed that any IDE is just as extensible by using Plug Ins.
Without turning the conversation into a university style lecture, what is one or two simple actions I can do in emacs to show someone what separates it from other IDES.
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You might be interested in this talk at next weekend’s Emacs Conf:
Emacs is a programmable interface to a computer. While it is frequently used to program itself to program other things, it is a foundational bootstrap tool.
IDE’s seek to present a set of features that fills that domain of work. You hit a ceiling in that world. With Emacs, you continue molding it to things you get value out of years and decades later, after that IDE went away when its most popular language or framework went into decline.
In the upcoming landscape of AI’s with more well-defined type interfaces and symbolic representations, tools like Emacs will be at the forefront of composing these tools into the long tail of cottage industries of what will amount to a revolution in IP, programming, and human-computer interfaces.
Good explanation, but the keyword is to “show” not tell
Have them show their IDE’s scripting environment and how they can quickly prototype an automation for something annoying without even going the distance to write a full plugin and then bind that automation to a key.
Then open org or something and show how you can write a version of Lispy for org outlines based on some predicates like
org-at-heading-p.
First I wouldn’t concern myself too much with trying to explain what differentiates Emacs from an IDE. Life is too short to get into such debates. I can’t really summarize why anyone should care about Emacs vs their IDE of choice.
For me what separates Emacs from vscode for instance is not the IDE aspects but the integration with the broader ecosystem. I’m a PM that works with technical and data heavy products. The details matter. I frequently walk through the pipelines and code of my product to understand how it is implemented by the team(s).
For example you can break my underlying product down into 3-4 large blocks of pipelines. Each pieline has 6-7 stages that mix Spark and other Python jobs. For each pipeline and stage I have my own little literate org file that points to code, has small samples of inputs and outputs, and generally speaking allows a non data engineering professional such as myself keep up with people that are far better and keeping this all in their head.
I write down questions as I do this to browse and/or raise with the team. I can, when questioned by our senior leadership, truly explain what it is our team did and the impact it had.
I can’t do that with an IDE. I can’t see an easy way to do that with any of the other note taking tools. I can’t jump between code browsing, executing and writing as seamlessly anywhere else.
Wow. I wish the PMs where I work understood data concepts to the depth you do.
True. I kind of fake it in notion by linking to the file and line on github, but it isn’t as good
I’d rate this as a story about the benefits of literate programming, and emacs org-babel is certainly best-of-breed for that. A more mainstream workflow for it might be through Jupyter notebooks, but they have several deficiencies compared to org-babel, chief of which is that one can’t present blocks out-of-order in Jupyter, but can do with org-babel-tangle. as far as I know, no literate-programming solution can pull code off disk and put it in a document (the anti-tangle direction), let alone update a doc when code is modified. It’s doable (start with git-actions, maybe?) but difficult. The lack of anti-tangle stopped my team from adopting literate programming as a collaboration tool, but it’s still great in the downward direction, i.e., from doc to code.
I’d agree but it goes a bit beyond. Each file has pointers to the source code that is locally checked out. Sure it’s not dynamic (e.g. my comments and understanding of what’s going on don’t sync with the codebase as it changes), but it still allows me to keep a mental map of what’s going on and where each piece of the pipeline resides.
It’s a mixture of roam, literate programming and an IDE for me. E.g. I can easily spin up a vterm, ssh into a spark node and test some of the code if I don’t understand what it’s doing thoroughly or to check if something isn’t doing what is intended.
In my use case, collaboration is not required. I’m doing it for me so there’s no real cost to the documentation and understanding getting out of date. I find emacs an invaluable tool to deepen my understanding and test things in the codebase. An IDE just doesn’t fit the bill in that regard.
For each pipeline and stage I have my own little literate org file
Damn, your verbose description checks all the boxes for a bullshit job.
Lol
PM
Bingo!
PM as in “project” or “product” manager? I’ve never experienced the former that wasn’t an oxygen thief, but I’ve heard unicorns exist. My current product manager is quite good imo: shields engineers from idea ferries from all levels; talks to support and customers; has good track record of picking projects that successfully increases product adoption; etc. I wish our product manager took the time to understand our codebases as the op here does. I think with that knowledge it would be easier to convince the PM of the importance of certain refactors and why certain requests estimates are more difficult and or tedious that the PM expects.
PM as in “project” or “product” manager?
yes
Maybe a mixed role is the fabled unicorn “project” manager.
Haha, why is that? To be clear that’s not an expectation of the job. It’s a self imposed process so that I understand wtf is going on. I enjoy it personally and feel it makes me better at what I do. Why do you think it’s bullshit?
It’s the always-on REPL that’s the kicker.
(defun invert-case () (backward-delete-char-untabify 1) (insert (funcall (if (< last-command-event ?a) #'downcase #'upcase) last-command-event))) (add-hook 'post-self-insert-hook #'invert-case)Then
C-u C-M-xoninvert-caseto convey the larger point that emacs is always running within a gdb-like harness. Your buddy will immediately bristle at the prohibitive investment necessary to achieve this pointless and trivial hack, at which point he’ll have truly grokked emacs.Pick any that you like from https://emacsrocks.com. My favourite is https://emacsrocks.com/e13.html well worth watching until the end where it all comes together.
Show him one of the email clients on GNU Emacs. Vterm’s directory tracking is also unique.
I don’t. I dont care what other people use. Folks noticing I have language server support in a terminal editor is funny though.
I mean, as a practical matter they are correct - most things people care about IDEs doing are just built in in other IDEs or doable via plugins. emacs is extremely niche and most people are correct to use something else.
It is an important skill to not care what other people use and not care what they think about what you use.
For me, it is not the ability to write plugins : most editors have those to some extent.
For me it’s more about the ease of writing your own customizations and not be limited to those provided by your plugins.
A few examples
- don’t like some built in or plugin behavior ? Copy paste the original source code, tweak it to your likint and use add-advice to use your new version
- just yesterday i had some tests which generated a log in a temporary folder, 5 folders deep. I wrote a new command and bound it to a shortcut that looked for the new log file and opened it after running my tests
- i wrote a simple log browser : use a few commands to preformat the file with query/replace, and boom with emacs’ outline mode i can fold sections /subsections. This command is 10 lines long.
The strength of emacs is not its plugins, it’s your ease of making it your own
You might get pretty far just by explaining that all emacs “plugins” use the same language as the editor, and then explaining the
C-hfamily of keybinds that let you see documentation for every variable and function.Then open one of those help pages for a package to show it and highlight the part where it tells you what file the function comes from, even for 3rd party packages. Then highlight how you can extend emacs in the same way, just writing some elisp on a file instead of needing to create an entire plugin.
A lot of emacs really needs to be discovered, but I’d imagine most developers could appreciate good documentation, the ability to see exactly what code is doing, and the option to override or extend that functionality very easily.