this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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How to show what separates emacs from other IDEs (alien.top)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I talked to someone about the extensibility of emacs, but the person I was speaking to assumed that any IDE is just as extensible by using Plug Ins.

Without turning the conversation into a university style lecture, what is one or two simple actions I can do in emacs to show someone what separates it from other IDES.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You might get pretty far just by explaining that all emacs “plugins” use the same language as the editor, and then explaining the C-h family of keybinds that let you see documentation for every variable and function.

Then open one of those help pages for a package to show it and highlight the part where it tells you what file the function comes from, even for 3rd party packages. Then highlight how you can extend emacs in the same way, just writing some elisp on a file instead of needing to create an entire plugin.

A lot of emacs really needs to be discovered, but I’d imagine most developers could appreciate good documentation, the ability to see exactly what code is doing, and the option to override or extend that functionality very easily.