GNU Emacs VS neovim

gnu.org - contains everything you need to research his philosophy.

stallman.org - personal website, contains a lot of opinion, but I absolutely respect this man in all what he says.

emacs.org (redirects to https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) - his non-philosophical work, one of two mainstream console text editors.

Forever, there was a file included in stock Emacs, `spook.el`, which could be hooked up to automatically add random strings of "interesting" keywords to each of your email or Usenet messages (in signatures, or in headers like `X-Spook`).

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

Looks like copyright date of 1988:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/spook....

Try `M-x spook RET` in an Emacs buffer.

If you want to spare a couple of detours, you probably could start with Emacs Org-mode according to Greenspun's eleventh rule: "Any sufficiently complicated PIM or note-taking program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode."

Emacs: winget install GNU.Emacs

The whole cl-lib thing is a total disaster:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs...

They added cl- as a prefix to each Common Lisp symbol.

FIRST is now called cl-first, CAAAR is now cl-caaar .

I would really prefer if GNU Emacs removes all Common Lisp functionality, instead of creating this really wacky stuff, with discussions about this topic every year.

Never too late to try! Take your time. Emacs will outlive us all. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

GNU Emacs is a versatile, open-source text editor that offers extensibility and customization—a sort of self-documenting real-time display editor. Our thanks for the suggestion go to CartanAnnullator.

Emacs

Their DEFUN and DEFVAR macros for example let us define a function or a variable that will be available as a Lisp function, and can be used as an ordinary C function from the C code. Emacs is written in pure C99 language and works with both GCC and Clang I believe. We can just define a C function via macro, and it is auto exported and made available to Lisp. For example my first patch to Emacs was for this function (we added "count" argument to make it possible to skip enumerating files in a directory for the case when user code is just interesting if a directory is empty or not):

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.