I talked to someone about the extensibility of emacs, but the person I was speaking to assumed that any IDE is just as extensible by using Plug Ins.

Without turning the conversation into a university style lecture, what is one or two simple actions I can do in emacs to show someone what separates it from other IDES.

  • HorrihBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    For me, it is not the ability to write plugins : most editors have those to some extent.

    For me it’s more about the ease of writing your own customizations and not be limited to those provided by your plugins.

    A few examples

    • don’t like some built in or plugin behavior ? Copy paste the original source code, tweak it to your likint and use add-advice to use your new version
    • just yesterday i had some tests which generated a log in a temporary folder, 5 folders deep. I wrote a new command and bound it to a shortcut that looked for the new log file and opened it after running my tests
    • i wrote a simple log browser : use a few commands to preformat the file with query/replace, and boom with emacs’ outline mode i can fold sections /subsections. This command is 10 lines long.

    The strength of emacs is not its plugins, it’s your ease of making it your own

  • arthurno1BEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    It is not so much about other tools or languages not being extensible; most quality ones are extensible. It is about how easy is to extend it since the text editor, debugging tools, and some other useful stuff like shell integration (process control, I/O), networking for example, are built into the extension language.

    It is very easy to write a small tool that automates something, like a say project creation for Emacs compared to for example Eclipse, Netbeans, or VisualStudio. Since Emacs GUI is in essence a glorified console, it is relatively easy to integrate CLI, text-based tools with Emacs.