I try to stay out of the editor wars; I'm a firm believer in the adage that you should pick a text editor for programming and stick with it. Learn it as best you can (and as it suits your needs) and use it everywhere. But a couple of recent experiences have caused me to really loathe Emacs. Okay, not really Emacs itself, since I know so little about it, but I really dislike the Emacs' "force it on you" attitude I've encountered recently.
First issue was in my attempt to gently learn Common Lisp. The book I was reading insisted on using Emacs... for the basic reason it allegedly helps in tracking parentheses. No. Don't write a book (or a programming language) on the assumption that a newbie will have to learn not only the new language, but also an entirely new (and non-intuitive) text editor.
Second issue was reading a book that used Oz (via Mozart) as its primary source for programming examples. Not a problem, so long as you teach me a little about the language. I even d/l the interpreter for my Mac OS. When I launched it, it insisted that I have Aquamacs installed. What? Why? And why that particular version of Emacs? I already have Emacs on my Mac to begin with! I don't want another one. So, I install Aquamacs and run it (independent of Mozart). Fine, now I see what it looks like. But how the hell do I exit? Why does't Cmd-Q work? Why is Aquamacs insistent on not letting me shoot myself in the foot and letting my Mac handle the quit routine? C-x C-c didn't work either. I had to force quit my way out of Aquamacs.
Anyway, the whole past couple of events have been really frustrating. I know how hard Vim is to learn, but I never, ever had a problem killing the app in a GUI environment, nor has any language book insist that I use it for that particular langauge. I also know I don't know Emacs itself at all, but why are there people out there so gung-ho on it that I can't possibly use an alternative? My hope in reading these books was to learn a new language or two, not struggle with installing software. So, I'm off to learn some other programming techniques instead. Maybe one day I'll come back to those books, after I've sufficiently learned Emacs on my own terms.
2 comments:
Hi Adam,
Aquamacs absolutely doesn't want to force anything on you.. and Command-Q should definitely work. I'm not sure what happened there, but we would certainly appreciate your bug report so we can fix the problem if there is one.
Best
- David Reitter
David,
Cmd-Q doesn't (edit: *didn't, but now does) work for me... but C-x C-c does. I think I may have mistyped it when trying to enter it, so I have to retract that part of my comment. I tried Aquamacs again and got a message at the bottom "Opening output file: no such file or directory, /users/Adam/Library/Preferences when pressing Cmd-Q.
...and lo and behold, the third time (now, just, in the middle of typing this comment) I tried it, it worked! The app closed nicely. Now when I launch Aquamacs, it closes quite neatly, the way I would have expected it the very first time I opened.
I admit to not having done a lot of troubleshooting before hand, btw. :)
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