alt Hacker NewsI have been a die hard emacs user for 20 years, and I have a very nice emacs setup (if a little bit idiosyncratic, but all emacs configs are idiosyncratic). However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it. What is more, I spend a lot of time doing it in tmux, over mosh, from my phone. Emacs ergonomy is just not great if all you have is a horrible phone keyboard (and no swiping, because tmux redraws the screen if you swipe). And then I discovered helix. It has all the things I was jealous about vim, BUT it has sane defaults ootb. And truth be told, another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.
Replies
Emacs has multicursor, lsp and treesitter so from just reading the helix landing page idk what you gain? Bat sounds interesting, thanks.
> However, recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it.
This has been the norm for a few decades. Even software engineering courses emphasize the fact that code is read far more often than it is changed, which leads to all the basic software engineering principles around the importance of making code easier to read and to navigate through.
>> recently I realized that I read code, but almost never write it.
I think most engineers are reading code than writing it. I find it very hard to not use Emacs when reading large codebases. Interestingly, its mostly because of file navigation. I love using ido/ivy for file navigation, quickly filtering through buffers, magit.
Emacs in terminal is not an ideal experience though. So I can imagine it being multi-fold worse with phone keyboard.