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is emacs just for hipsters? is it really any more productive or fun as using, say, vs code?
Yes, it is way more productive once you get comfy with the macro stuff. The other day I wanted to change a bunch of instances of
(fn (event)
(frobnicate bar event))
to
#(frobnicate bar %)
where all the frobnicates and bars and whitespace and indentation were different. Possible with a regex, easy with a macro combining searching and paredit.
You don’t need to learn all of Emacs. Just use what you use. Emacs is a big soupy sea and you use the bits and pieces you’ve managed to fish out of that sea and that’s great.
In productivity generally, this idea of taking time off to get skilled at a tool has sometimes been described as sharpening the saw. I needed to take a few days off to learn git stuff for work, since I was (and still am) spending more time trying to get git stuff right than the actual lisp, which is where I’m in my own kitchen.
Juan chimed in as a non–Emacs-user.
Emacs shines when you’re gonna go way beyond what normal editors can do. It’s a tangle of wires, a set of apps that you can tear apart and recombine the pieces however you want. In the Unix world, you can glue apps together into Rube Goldberg contraptions, with the pipe system. It’s wonderful. In Emacs, you can do that, but additionally the apps are made of Lego and you can tear apart the pieces and recombine them in new ways easily.
I actually don’t use ido, helm, or ivy. I like to use just the core bits that I’ve picked up, learned, stumbled upon or made over the last two decades. I don’t have any “Emacs FOMO” that I’d be missing out on some unknown feature. Sticking post it notes on my monitor when I’m learning some advanced mode is good enough for me and Bobby McGee.