For what reasons you DON'T use Emacs?

Question

On the Emacs development list there is long thread (you can find it here) about the "Emacs learning curve" (this is the name of the thread). The participants have various opinions about why some people may not want to use Emacs. If you gave an Emacs a try in the past and then chose an other editor/IDE instead then please describe in your answer here the reasons which made you look for an other tool.

Your answers can give some real world input to the developers on how Emacs should be changed, so that new users can discover its powers and don't give up trying. Thanks.

Answer 1

I once tried emacs, but I was already pretty familiar with vim, so I didn't really have any incentive to get good at emacs. That's the only reason for me, really.

Answer 2

As a novice programmer, I just find vim's use of modes more appealing than the keyboard combinations used in Emacs.

Answer 3

I tried Emacs for a while and then Vim, and decided to stay with Vim. The reason was that in Emacs you constantly had to use Shift/Ctrl/Alt which was uncomfortable, compared to Vim.

Answer 4

Because VI is installed on the servers by default, emacs isn't.

Answer 5

The effectiveness of Autocomplete/Intellisense is very dependent on the language. For instance, with C, I find the autocomplete in Visual Studio, which I use whenever I code in Windows, nearly useless. For languages like C, Perl, Python and the like, I use Emacs.

However, Emacs seems very counterproductive for something like C# or Java because it lacks the extremely useful built-in documentation* and autocomplete functionality of Eclipse and Visual Studio. I know that it has a rudimentary autocomplete for some modes, and very many Emacs Lisp packages available, but I haven't found anything that even comes close to Eclipse or Visual Studio.

*(not counting man pages! I mean something like where Visual Studio puts tooltips with documentation over members, etc.)

Answer 6

This might sound silly, but I didn't like the font rendering and didn't feel like customizing it. Second reason is that I thought it was the ugliest program period. It'll give MSBOB a run for its money

Answer 7

Ah, the fresh smell of flame bait.

I like my tools to be as invisible as possible. I am most productive when I can spend all of my time thinking about my problem and not my text editor.

I gave emacs an honest try, but ultimately found other tools to be better for me. I just never found it to be intuitive.

Answer 8

can't stand the whole two sets of key combinations for a command thing in any editor I have seen it in. I tried really really hard to like emacs, but I couldn't get over that. now I use vim, and still wish that emacs wasn't so painful (physically and figeratively) to use

Answer 9

I love emacs and use it every day, but for Java development I usually use Eclipse. I've tried to set up the emacs Java Development Environment and it wasn't able to handle parsing the newer syntax features (annotations, generics) that I use regularly.

For emacs macro recording/playback tasks, I'll open the Java code in emacs, edit and then switch back to Eclipse.

Here are some of the features I can't live without now, which are found in Eclipse with keyboard shortcuts but not available to me in emacs:

• Context-sensitive auto-complete.
• Fuzzy search for a class name and open the source. Searching by initials for CamelCaseClasses is wonderful.
• Who overrides this method?
• Who calls this method?
• Run or debug just this unit test (just this method).
• Warn me about unused imports, deprecated methods, etc.
• Hover over a declaration to preview the HTML version of the javadoc.
• Reorganize imports, e.g. change import java.util.* to a bunch of imports for just the classes I actually use.
• Redeploy this webapp in Tomcat (automatic when you save a file via this plugin)

Top reasons I open emacs:

• Record editing macros for complex but repetitive editing.
• Edit remote files via tramp.
• Edit files when I don't have an Eclipse project defined.