Protesilaos Stavrou: Commend on Unix versus Emacs

In this post, Protesilaos answers an email by one of his readers. In the email, the sender seems to assume that Emacs is bloated by definition, and that e.g. Vim isn’t, because it comes with less stuff baked-in and works well with piping – the core way to compose in *nix command lines.

The sender asks:

This video [of Luke] really provide some good reasons why to invest on ‘coreutils’ to build a small, maintainable and decentralized system rather than investing on a giant mutable system.

Emacs being the giant, mutable system, and the pipe-able Unix command-line tools comprising the “maintainable and decentralized system”. (That way of asking is loaded with assumptions already.)

Prot does a very good job at not preaching, and actually bringing forth useful arguments.

  • Vim has a lot of stuff built-in, like a terminal emulator, and isn’t that different from Emacs in that way. (Plain vi is a different beast.)
  • Prot treats Emacs “as a layer of interactivity on top of Unix”. That’s a very good description, I think.
  • There is non-negligible overhead in composing a system of many independent pieces. You end up writing a lot of glue code, so to speak. (And it can be rather brittle.)
  • Emacs ties things together into a coherent software where you can share stuff between pieces of functionality easily. You can copy from the Emacs shell and paste in a text buffer. You can perform mass text replacement from a UI you already know instead of having to learn syntax. (Opposed to sed/awk/…)

In closing, Prot points out that the underlying issue can be binary thinking (which is rather limited and avoids entertaining opposing opinions):

This hints at the kind of thinking that treats the world in simplistic, binary terms: Unix is simple VS Emacs is complex; Arch Linux is for hackers VS Ubuntua is for simpletons… Those are stereotypes that rest on misunderstandings about the intent and the purpose of each of those paradigms, their context-specific pros and cons, as well as the potentially numerous reasons one may have to opt for a given choice.

Worth a read during this time “between the years.”

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