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> Emacs Lisp — millions of people run Lisp every day without knowing it, because their editor is a Lisp interpreter. Are there seriously any emacs users who ar

> Emacs Lisp — millions of people run Lisp every day without knowing it, because their editor is a Lisp interpreter. Are there seriously any emacs users who are completely unaware of elisp? Isn't elisp the entire point of picking emacs?

BeetleB 25d ago
Most Emacs users I personally know simply treat it as an editor. They're not really aware how it works under the hood.
- zelphirkalt 25d ago
  Still doubt, that they are unaware of Elisp. Bare bones vanilla Emacs is maybe a bit much to get used to these days, so anyone wanting to configure their Emacs will have opened their init.el or so file and will have put some Elisp snippets there.
  - BeetleB 24d ago
    I've helped such people with their configs. They just know it as "commands" they put in the init file - they don't think of it as a programming language. It's rare for simple init.el files to have things like functions, loops, etc. And, to be frank, most of them don't customize the init.el file. They just want a text editor - not an IDE. The defaults are ugly, but they're perfectly functional. None of these people customized Notepad or any other editor either. They're simply solving the problem of "I've SSH'ed into a remote machine. How do I edit this file?"
    - zelphirkalt 24d ago
      Why are they then even setting up vanilla Emacs in particular? Not impossible, of course, but it seems like a strange choice to make when not wanting to engage with its configuration. Or maybe another question would be who set them up with vanilla, unconfigured Emacs, if they are not so technical users? Even discovering tramp is not trivial or automatic and for working on a remote machine, isn't Vim much more common?
      - NetMageSCW 24d ago
        Vim (and Vi in general) make vanilla emacs seem sensible and approachable.
      - BeetleB 24d ago
        Emacs is just there in their environment. They didn't set anything up. > Even discovering tramp is not trivial or automatic and for working on a remote machine, isn't Vim much more common? Full confession: I, as a power Emacs user don't use tramp. It's ok not to. I know people disagree with me, but for the most basic editing Emacs has virtually no learning curve compared to Vim. You just open the file and start typing like you would any other editor.
        wild_egg 24d ago
        What kind of environments are these? I can't say I have ever encountered emacs in the wild. The only people I have ever met who run emacs did it as an explicit decision because they wanted the malleability. Even having emacs just there in their environment, most people would avoid it because they don't know what it is, and will open Notepad or TextEdit or whatever familiar program is at hand.
        BeetleB 24d ago
        A lot of engineering companies have Linux accounts you log in to. The employees' laptops are Windows but a good amount of engineering work is in Linux. Hence they SSH in and do their work. These accounts are managed by IT. They pre install all these tools.

BeetleB 25d ago

Most Emacs users I personally know simply treat it as an editor. They're not really aware how it works under the hood.

zelphirkalt 25d ago
Still doubt, that they are unaware of Elisp. Bare bones vanilla Emacs is maybe a bit much to get used to these days, so anyone wanting to configure their Emacs will have opened their init.el or so file and will have put some Elisp snippets there.
- BeetleB 24d ago
  I've helped such people with their configs. They just know it as "commands" they put in the init file - they don't think of it as a programming language. It's rare for simple init.el files to have things like functions, loops, etc. And, to be frank, most of them don't customize the init.el file. They just want a text editor - not an IDE. The defaults are ugly, but they're perfectly functional. None of these people customized Notepad or any other editor either. They're simply solving the problem of "I've SSH'ed into a remote machine. How do I edit this file?"
  - zelphirkalt 24d ago
    Why are they then even setting up vanilla Emacs in particular? Not impossible, of course, but it seems like a strange choice to make when not wanting to engage with its configuration. Or maybe another question would be who set them up with vanilla, unconfigured Emacs, if they are not so technical users? Even discovering tramp is not trivial or automatic and for working on a remote machine, isn't Vim much more common?
    - NetMageSCW 24d ago
      Vim (and Vi in general) make vanilla emacs seem sensible and approachable.
    - BeetleB 24d ago
      Emacs is just there in their environment. They didn't set anything up. > Even discovering tramp is not trivial or automatic and for working on a remote machine, isn't Vim much more common? Full confession: I, as a power Emacs user don't use tramp. It's ok not to. I know people disagree with me, but for the most basic editing Emacs has virtually no learning curve compared to Vim. You just open the file and start typing like you would any other editor.
      - wild_egg 24d ago
        What kind of environments are these? I can't say I have ever encountered emacs in the wild. The only people I have ever met who run emacs did it as an explicit decision because they wanted the malleability. Even having emacs just there in their environment, most people would avoid it because they don't know what it is, and will open Notepad or TextEdit or whatever familiar program is at hand.
        BeetleB 24d ago
        A lot of engineering companies have Linux accounts you log in to. The employees' laptops are Windows but a good amount of engineering work is in Linux. Hence they SSH in and do their work. These accounts are managed by IT. They pre install all these tools.