I have been a user of emacs for more than a decade. I am not a pro, but my config has swollen little by little. What really got me into emacs was the interaction with the python repl. It was amazing. Only Jupyter notebooks did something similar for me. Lately I have been using VScode, as the notebook experience for data science is very good and emacs cannot really compete here as notebooks are web based since the beggining, and vscode is an electron app. Packages like ein was just an ok replacement. Also I have been using logseq instead of org-mode, as the android app is very good and allow me to add stuff from the camera and using the pen with the whiteboard. I am mainly using org-mode to define large project files and leaving logseq for note taking.
The later but the hype with neovim and in much smaller scale with helix got me interest, as I have been using less emacs lately. So I decided to try them. And for the first time I feel I was in the presence of real competitors. Emacs has always been about text editing + poweful ide like tools added using plugins made by the community using a scripting language, in emacs case elisp. I liked VSCode despite the bloat because it was similar in spirit, a editor that can customize and make tools for using a scripting language, javascript. I never like vi/vim. Modal typing is nice for using command without modifier keys. But you could only use those commands on vi /vim, so I did not see the point in learning a typing system for some type saving. I always laugh with the emacs pinky meme, when in practice most vim users used screen and tmux and use ctrl all the time. And alt+tab for geeting to the browser. Plugins were not really enough for my coding and they were awful in comparison with the emacs ecosystem. And you can get evil mode in emacs. But neovim is a different beast. The change from the old vimscript to Lua and how the community embraced the change turn it into an editor very close to emacs. I installed the lazyvim distro, and my experience was very similar to doom emacs. Actually I found a bit better to update all the packages installed by default. And the interaction python was also closer to emacs thanks to iron.nvim. I could installed in a remote machine that I have issue installing a new version of emacs due to lack of permissions. So very nice experience.
Helix is a monolitic editor that comes with “battery include”, and it doesn’t have a plugin system yet (although the devs might add a scheme like scripting in the future). But the editor is much more feature complete than neovim without plugins. It lacks a repl interaction, so I cannot really use but it looks nice and might have a interesting future.
My conclusion is that editors of all kinds are becoming more and more like emacs, a core with a plugin system. Emacs is a very tiny core and the rest is elisp so you can change everything, but most people never get close to try to do that. Neovim+Lua is a good example that a you don’t need so much flexibilty and you don’t even need a powerful scripting language. Lua point is to be simple enough without losing too much power. Vscode+JS is a similar story. We are witnessing carcinisation for editors.
> My conclusion is that editors of all kinds are becoming more and more like emacs, a core with a plugin system.
Other editors have a core and an api and a scripting language for writing plugins. Emacs doesn’t have that. When you write code for emacs it becomes a part of emacs. The C code is not a core, it is more like parts of emacs that were rewritten in C to be be faster. Elisp is not a scripting language that speaks to a core via an API. This is one of the things that sets emacs apart from the other editors and ides you mention.
The other is the power of lisp. Lisp is homiconic. From Wikipedia:
Finally, emacs treats everything as text. In the Unix tradition everything in the OS boils down to text. You used text in a REPL or Shell, log files were simply plain text files, configuration was done by editing other plain text files. Emacs is designed for that world. And it still largely is true, but many things that used to be kept in text files are now in databases, and highly structured formats like YAML or JSON (which at least is better than the nightmare of using XML for config files) and we need to interact and manage far more binaries (blobs) than we used to. Email used to be plain text and blob attachments were rare. Now most people use email as html marked up text linked to blobs.
Emacs is not designed for this, which some now see as a disadvantage. But only if you no longer live at the text level of the stack. Most people today want to live in a mediated WYSIWYG environment.
I personally don’t like mediated environments. I have never liked Disneyland, (I visited Disneyworld when I was a kid in the 70’s when I was still living in the States) it makes me uncomfortable not knowing how everything works. The magic of Disneyland is the suspension of belief, that you can pretend for a while that the illusion you are presented with is real. I prefer to know who the person is that stands behind the curtain pushing the levers that creates the dazzle of smoke and pyrotechnics.
I still prefer to work with systems running on bare metal rather than in the cloud. But that world is now all but gone. Hardware has been sequestered into datacenters that you can only enter after passing through man traps. I still run two racks of servers in my office. But the funding for keeping these running is no longer there and we’re moving everything into cloud services with datacenters located in Tokyo two time zones away. It IS far easier and cheaper, but I no longer have control of the entire stack and I don’t feel the deep connection and understanding of the systems we now run as I used to… I don’t miss the old days but I miss the control we had over what we built and maintained.
That is why I have used emacs for more than 25 years and have no intention of stopping.
Regardless of the language, i feel like there is a core layer where it handles lower level stuff and an outer layer we typically interact with.
but the point is the language is the only layer boundary. Once you’re in Elisp there is no boundary, no layers. You may choose not to go there, but the only thing stopping you is your own choice.