Re: The e(macs)lephant in the room and the Guix Bang

[Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@gmail.com>]

Am Sonntag, dem 24.09.2023 um 02:37 -0500 schrieb Nathan Dehnel:
> > I'm sorry if my tone was too harsh, I now realise this is still
> > triggering old pain.
> 
> > Why is it still OK to for people to keep spreading negative
> > anecdotes about Emacs, and problematic to refute them or counter
> > them with positive anecdotes?
> 
> It was a mistake to say that. I felt the reflexive need to justify
> why I don't use emacs, or else people would just tell me to use it
> anyways as a result of talking about not knowing of a decent
> (alternative) lisp editor.
I mean, you could try using it anyways, whether it's vanilla emacs,
customized emacs, guile studio, or the heavily popularized spacemacs,
doom, etc. variants.  On the Guix side, it doesn't really matter, our
configuration works with packages based on Emacs.

It's fine if you prefer another editor, but don't count on us to write
documentation for every editor out there, especially when it almost
always turns out to be invoking "guix edit" followed by "git commit …"
or perhaps using that editor's built-in VC integration to do so.  I'm
also not convinced you need to bring the big guns of lisp editing to
the table.  From personal experience, an editor that autocompletes the
closing bracket and has parentheses matching capabilities suffices. 
The latter is even implemented by crude tools such as gnome-text-
editor.

> > It's been me believing exactly such lies that scared me away from
> > starting with Emacs for years, lost years in a way; something I
> > deeply regret: this has to stop.
> 
> I want to clarify that I'm not just repeating rumors and I actually
> have tried to use emacs.
There is a wide span of "tried emacs".  I personally wouldn't say I've
"tried" vi after hitting ESC :q once and being done or even that I've
tried using ed after vaguely figuring out how you can make it actually
change the contents of a file.

Now whether you want to qualify your experience further or not is up to
you, and even if you do, your personal choice of a suitable editor
remains personal.  However, I don't think that repeating the age old
jokes of "herp derp, me no likes defaults" as has happened in other
branches of this topic is helpful.  *The defaults in Emacs do not
matter.*  You don't need to be happy with the editor you get out of the
box.  You can change it into the editor you want and there's ample
documentation on how to do so.  Coming full circle, this is why we
reference Emacs in the manual, enough people collaborated to suggest a
workflow that works for them or at least goes in the right direction. 
However, I think it's fair to say that most folks' setup will differ
ever so slightly from what is presented there.

Cheers