Even more batteries included with Emacs

All the other comments in this thread talk about emacs instability when that hasn't been the case for me. I'm on doom emacs, update once in a while, and everything mostly just works other than some color scheme weirdness I had to fix.

I used to be on neovim, and that ecosystem compared to emacs feels like this image: https://i.imgflip.com/2pg2s7.jpg

Some of it is the maintainer shielding us from the breaking changes, but I also think the ecosystem is more slow moving than other editors which helps. The editor is older than most devs after all.

The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a dent: when people boot it up it has to have the good stuff right in their face. This also means ditching the "vanilla Emacs only" snobbery.

That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.

I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired.

Also karthik is the author of gptel mode.

I saw orgmode once and I really loved it. Used Doomed and spacemacs. But dear Lord, does everything break on updates and need fixing. I had to give up as I just don't think it's feasible for me to fix my emacs when I want to get some work done.

Nice write up about Emacs, ruler-mode is a thing I never used before.

Recently I finally start to C-X M-x to do text scaling, the typing is hard even as near 2 decades user of Emacs.

Emacs is a great OS. If you complement it with vim then you may have a working editor as well, provided you know how to exit from vim.

My 2 cents (I hope I don't offend anyone, and of course Emacs community is amazing). I've been using Emacs full-time since ~2010 but I must admit it's been more like part-time along with VSCode since ~2024.

> 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...

I LOVE Emacs, but I HATE it when I have the irresistible urge to edit text, but Emacs has dead batteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo