The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
January 17, 2021
20 mins read
In 2018 Bryan Cantrill gave a brilliant talk where he shared his recent
experiences with the Rust programming language. More profoundly, he
explored a facet of software that is oftentimes overlooked: the
values of
the software we use. To paraphrase him slightly:
Values are defined as
expressions of relative importance. Two things that
we’re comparing could both be good attributes. The real question is, when
you have to make a choice between two of them, what do you choose? That
choice that you make, reflects your core values.
The next-to-last column is with -jTO-THE-MAX, and the last column is with -j1.
I’m impressed! The M1 is able to build Emacs almost as fast as my AMD machine… which is a lot bigger.
Of course, on Debian I’m using gcc and on Macos I’m using clang, so it’s an apples-to-some-different-brand-of-apples comparison.
It’s even more impressive how much faster this laptop is compared to the Apple laptop from… 2019? Yeah. It’s more than twice as fast! And doesn’t have a fan! The old Apple laptop would sound like a VAX in a hurricane while building Emacs!
– Maya Angelou
CIDER started its life as an effort to replace a
hacked version of SLIME
1 with a proper environment for Clojure
development on Emacs. Many of you probably don’t remember those days,
but initially almost everyone was using a modified version of SLIME
for Clojure development, as there weren’t many (any?) alternatives
back in the day. The creation of CIDER was fueled mostly by the advent of
nREPL, which was the first project that aimed to
provide a common tool-agnostic foundation for Clojure development
tools, and by the desire to address the impedance mismatch between
SLIME and Clojure.
.github View code
This repository provides a tiny
.emacs file to set up Emacs quickly
for Common Lisp programming. This document provides a detailed
description of how to set it up and get started with Common Lisp
programming.
This repository provides a good middle ground between configuring Emacs
manually by installing SLIME, Paredit, etc. yourself with
M-x package-install commands and installing Portacle. It promotes a
do-it-yourself approach to automate customizing Emacs for Common Lisp
programming. Here is how the development environment is going to look
like:
If you are already comfortable with Emacs and only want to understand
the content of the