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emacs is a lot easier to configure than anything else IMO because it’s self-documenting. If you want to know how to use or configure some command it’s trivially easy to jump to the source code of that command and just see how it works (or modify it, step through it with a debugger, etc). You can’t do that in any other environment as far as I’m aware.

That said, yeah, it certainly doesn’t Just Work out of the box the way something like vscode does.






yes!! i would love an environment where every binary carries a mapping from the exe back to the source code, DWARF is kinda this but there's very little tooling around it and distros often don't ship it by default. i want something like gdbserver but built into the editor and terminal.

That is also my dream; doing as much as possible inside emacs, using plugins written in emacs lisp, is basically the closest you can get to it today.

There are modifications of emacs that appeal to normies like spacemacs



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