alt Hacker NewsThe "Emacs doesn't have a file-tree" is when I stopped short and wondered what this person's background is in IDEs.
My emacs days are 1999 during my "functional or get out" phase, but my .emacs had close to 4000 lines in it, including xterm mouse support, a clone of midnight commander + sftp to a wehbost and deep integration with ctags/cscope/c++filt. There was even a line by line debugger with custom .gdbinit commands - look at the php project's gdbinit[1] if you want an idea of how to walk your own super special data structures.
You can't put Emacs in an IDE comparison and say anything about features without at least one person saying "well, actually".
I eventually switched to vim but that had to do with needing to ssh into 100k+ machines on support rotation & never having emacs on any of them.
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He said the same about vim, but did everyone forget about netrw? Here, go into vim and type `:Ex`. You can also have mouse support. (Netrw can also do trees if you don't like the format, go look at `g:netrw_liststyle`)
My friend on eMacs say something similar, but you don't really need as many plugins as people typically use. There's lots of native ways to do things. It's totally fine to prefer NerdTree over the native netrw but it's not like you can't do file exploring. Hell, I use fzf most times (`:GFiles`). But what I don't like is when people confidently say "x can't do y" when it can. I'll give people a break if it requires plugins or complicated commands, but native ones? It just shows ignorance.
While we're on the topic, stop using Esc, use <C-[>. You don't need Esc. And type `set -o vi` into bash/zsh. It's still worth learning your tools. You'll find lots of solutions to problems that only exist because of ignorance. Maybe those solutions are better, but the bigger problem seems to be ignorance. It's fine to be ignorant too! There's a shit ton of docs, no one expects you to read it all. But it's a good place to start
Considering that the very first paragraph of their README has:
> toast is for the developer who wants to stay in their terminal without spending hours getting it up to snuff.
I think he knows you can get anything you want in emacs/vim. The pitch is that toast is batteries-included.
I’m surprised you wouldn’t use TRAMP for remote access then?
Yeah, speedbar and dired are built-in. Speedbar by default still opens in a new frame I think, but in emacs 31 there’s a config option to make it open in a side window without any additional tweaking needed.
Sigh.
Long time ago, in mid-2000-s I tried to switch to Emacs or Vim from Visual Studio.
I wanted to have a simple project file tree as a side panel and multiple editor tabs on the right. I spent a week toying with various elisp scripts, Vim plugins, and digging out information from a then-moribund XEmacs mailing list.
And I couldn't do what I wanted in the end. Nothing worked seamlessly or reliably.
Can this be done out-of-the-box now?
It also incorrectly says that Emacs has no mouse support. When you first open Emacs the default buffer has clickable links in it, it's impossible to miss the fact that Emacs has mouse support if you ever even open it.