People make fun of vi because it’s hard to get out, but it says right there: “esc : w q”. Whereas getting out of emacs apparently requires the gradual realization over the course of decades that all of your heroes are monsters and the ideological basis of the liberatory movements you championed in your youth are inherently flawed, and they are futile exercises
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3 years later
@gemelen @mcc @glyph I was going to see what the emacs UI was like, but after `sudo dnf install emacs` I was greeted with:
"Transaction Summary:
Installing: 31 packages
Total size of inbound packages is 124 MiB. Need to download 124 MiB.
After this operation, 514 MiB extra will be used (install 514 MiB, remove 0 B)."
WHY DOES A TEXT EDITOR NEED TO BE HALF A GIGABYTE IN SIZE
@techokami @gemelen @glyph it can read mail
@techokami @gemelen @mcc I know, it's so small! They get it that way by not shipping Electron
3 years earlier
@glyph it actually took me *years* after that to figure out how to quit emacs. Every time I was in a bookstore I'd look for an emacs book and see if I could find the quit command in one with my stretch goal trying to figure out how to use the plainly visible menu at the top of the screen. I did eventually figure the quit out this way but never did find out how the menu worked
This is a joke, but only because you still don’t actually get out of emacs after all that stuff
OK so it's fun to be snarky, but, I do legitimately think that Emacs has a lot of interesting ways to think about text and interactive programming, and new people *should* immerse themselves in it and learn it. The community is far less toxic than it once was. But it's hard to get excited about it and advocate for it when it's dragging around *so* much baggage, not least of which in the form of its founder
3 years later
![Chris [list of emoji]](https://nfts.freeradical.zone/accounts/avatars/109/127/168/397/951/576/original/e8a0b6da977923a8.jpeg "Chris [list of emoji]")
It turns out XEmacs is still being (minimally) maintained. Maybe it's time to try to revive it.
@suetanvil eh… for me at least it’s missing literal decades worth of features I actually use daily
@glyph This is not a joke : When I first booted up LinuxPPC in the late 90s, the first thing I'd written down I needed to do was edit a file, and I'd written down I could do that with vi or emacs. (I didn't have X up yet.) When I opened vi I was able to figure out how to get into the help facility by key mashing, and then that told me how to quit. When I ran emacs I couldn't figure out how to quit. I had to kill it from another vterm.
The result of this is I still use vi 25 years later.