The text editor, or IDE, is probably the developers' best friend. Is the editor almost like a ... family member? You spend a lot of time with your text editor: writing, navigating and reading code. Just like a family member, a text editor can be a source of inspiration, annoying, joyful, difficult to figure out and probably something you will need a break from at times.
For a couple of months, I've been on quite a learning journey. I have joined a team where we write code in Clojure, a radically different language from what I’m used to. I also decided to try out a new editor: Emacs, radically different from tools that I am used to.
I still struggle with the context switch of copying some text from a browser (using the well known key combinations ⌘+c and ⌘+v) - to copy-paste in Emacs, using the Kill-ring-save (M-w) and Yank commands (C-y).
So why did I choose Emacs?
It is in fact a very good Clojure editor. There's a lot of really nice plugins and features for writing Clojure and ClojureScript. Also, compared to programming languages like Python or JavaScript, it seems there aren’t that many tools out there designed for Clojure development. Once you have the features and key combinations in place, Emacs is a very nice developer experience.
Clojure is a very nice developer experience. 💫
It turns out that Emacs also is really good for writing Python and JavaScript. I guess you could use Emacs for anything text based, but I'm not there yet.
Here's my current Clojure, Python and JavaScript friendly Emacs configuration that will probably be updated continuously as I learn more, and how to replace annoying text editor defaults.
No comments:
Post a Comment