I started using Emacs in 1999 when I ditched Windows for Linux. Over the years I've made attempts at getting into using modern IDE:s but it's never lasted long. Part of it is habit but a big reason is that I really enjoy hanging out in the terminal and if you're into editors that run in the terminal Emacs is undeniably one of a very small number of serious contenders.
The one thing that always bothered me about Emacs though is the lack of cohesion between all the parts. Emacs is a great tool surrounded by a rich ecosystem, but with no one in charge of making sure all of the pieces fit together that task falls upon the user. Configuring Emacs always felt like rolling your own Linux distro, a fun learning experience for a while and a frustrating time sink in the long run.
A Vim detour
In about 2012 I got fed up with trying to get different elisp modules to work together (and also the snarkiness in the Emacs community at the time) and decided to give Vim a try. I seem to remember that Vim was very much in vogue back then. Speakers a tech conferences wielding MacBooks covered in stickers used Vim. Rails-people used Vim. Vim felt like someone who hung out in a coffee shop ordering macchiatos and Emacs felt more and more like a neckbeard guy with bad personal hygiene.
Then in 2017 I came back to Emacs. Probably because Vim was plagued by the same basic problem as Emacs. Coming back I was pleasantly surprised that there where now package managers for Emacs. That made a big difference. I got my config working for the languages I used and fiddled as little as possible with it.
The Language Server Protocol
But over the last few years a much more important shift has swept across the
editor landscape — the advent of the Language Server
Protocol coming out of Visual Studio
Code. The basic idea of the language server is
that you can build one tool for understanding and manipulating let's say Python
source code and then have different editors talk to that tool over LSP. Instead
of having 100 different editors figure out ways to work with Python, you build
one tool that does it and have all the editors talk to that tool over the same
protocol. I first experienced the bliss that is LSP using the TypeScript
language server with lsp-mode in Emacs. For some reason it worked out of the
box and provided an editor experience that was way ahead of what I would have
with other languages in Emacs. Since then I've tried numerous times to get
lsp-mode to work with the different Python lsp offerings but to no avail. This
has been going on for a couple of years.
The advent of Emacs distributions
Last night I decided to give it another try. Temporarily throwing out all of my
Emacs config files and worked an hour at getting a basic working
lsp-mode & Python configuration in place. Failing to get it to work and
googling for solutions I came across Doom
Emacs. I'd heard about Doom Emacs and
it's sibling Spacemacs before, but I'd thought of
them mainly as tools for making Emacs more palatable to new users coming over
from Vim. But Doom Emacs and Spacemacs are primarily Emacs distributions in the
same way that Debian and Ubuntu are Linux distributions. Having a distribution
around an editor might seem like overkill, but in the case of Emacs that is
sometimes referred to as an OS, it makes perfect sense.
After an hour or two of fiddling with Doom Emacs not only did I have lsp-mode
working with Python but I also had pretty much everything else that I care about
in Emacs back in place. My old Emacs config, measured 1200+ lines of code broken
up over 20 files. My Doom Emacs config is 320 lines of pre-generated highly
commented and readable configuration. Using diff I figured out that I changed
exactly 17 (seventeen) lines out of those 320 to get Emacs to behave the way I
want. It's only been a day but it's safe to say that I will not be going back to
vanilla Emacs any time soon.
The future
What does all of this mean for the future? There's been some recent discussion in the Emacs community about how to attract new users. Doom Emacs and Spacemacs gets mentions. On the one hand, they are credited with easing the learning curve for new users and on the other, they are critizied for not contributing back upstream.
To my mind, it's clear that the distros are here to stay and that they breathe fresh air into the Emacs ecosystem. In combination with the rise of LSP they provide Emacs a much-needed shot in the arm. I've been thinking of Emacs as a problem in my development workflow for quite some time, thinking that sooner or later I'll have to rip off the band aid and shift to using modern IDE:s, thinking that the productivity gap between Emacs and modern tools would just get wider. My experience with Doom Emacs finally having a Python-editing experience on par with VSCode turned that thought on it's head. I now feel that I can probably stay with Emacs another 20 years.
Then again it might be that editors will gradually be reduced to being clients of language servers over the coming years. Replicating the immense ecosystem around Emacs and starting afresh with a new terminal-based editor never seemed plausible before. LSP has completely changed that and it's now very likely that we will see a slew of modern "editors" that mostly act as packaging and distribution for a curated list of language servers and a thin client to talk to them.