Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)
9 comments
·October 14, 2025billfruit
internet_points
I don't think lsp servers should be bundled, they're often huge, and e.g. for haskell you need the one that matches your ghc version, so you'd need ..all of them? and they need to be kept up-to-date etc. There is an emacs LSP server package manager at https://github.com/deirn/mason.el though – maybe something like that could be included, and Emacs could suggest how to install an appropriate LSP server (and enable eglot). I know many of the old hackers bristle at this, but I think it should be possible to do some kind of helpful but non-intrusive hinting for new users (one can always `setq clippy nil`)
They could at least change the default theme to one of the already-bundled modus-themes or something.
billfruit
Once we get a modern IDE like PyCharm or Intellij Idea, the auto complete is essentially built in, without needing to deal with installing LSP servers, clients, and their dependencies.
Out of the box, project and context aware auto complete is an essential feature in a modern IDE.
internet_points
Last I checked, an IDE like Android Studio (based on IDEA) needs to download a hogshead of java before it can even begin to build anything. And if you switch compiler versions, it needs to download even more. Sure it makes installing java as easy as clicking a few buttons, and it'd be great if Emacs made it as easy, but still: it doesn't bundle every version. No one would have the drive space for that. And now consider that emacs has support for not just java/kotlin, but pretty much every programming language in existence..
worthless-trash
Except pycharm won't work with my erlang lsp.
teddyh
Why not instead blame Windows for not having the standard tools “grep” and “find”?
positron26
The criticism makes sense when you consider that yeah, while posix tools are okay, needing them everywhere means you have something wrong in your programming ecosystem, and Elisp has many things wrong.
positron26
WSL2. While it's a fair criticism, the underlying issue here is that there aren't enough Windows users who program and upstream things for individual users to get support. Lean on the Linux ecosystem and things are fine.
The reason there aren't programmers targeting the large market is a tangent into why I'm building PrizeForge, but the answer now doesn't change.
lll-o-lll
Umm. Is this some sort of troll article? It sucks you in with nerd nostalgia and slowly becomes more and more esoteric and insane.
Here’s the final two lines:
> We should know better than to prematurely optimize for order when all of all time arrowpoints in and down to the absolute return 0. Words of wisdom, let it be: your world is a fine stream of consciousness, lacking only a decent editor.
If that feels like your jam, go for it, but personally I feel in need of an exorcist after letting my computer load this…
While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration.
Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.
If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.