This doesn't make sense. You used to be someone easily distracted by yak shaving, is what it reads like.

Installing features in Emacs is not exactly tough, either. I do think you can get distracted by the sea of things you can install. Probably no different from the new toys in the realm.

Makes sense to me. I love both emacs and vim, but I agree there are too many yaks to be shaved to get them in a usable state.

I question the lack of shaving in the next application. Seems there is always something that could have been done a different way.

The features just aren't there for me in Atom. I have a feeling they are if you're a web developer, but us non webdevs are left out in the cold (at least for now). Compare LaTeX and R in Atom to AUCTeX and ESS in Emacs and it's like night and day. Every time I switch to Atom I get frustrated within a day due to lack of features for the things I use.

pen and paper my friend. punched cards even.

You might be interested in this amazing tutorial. It shows how to configure emacs to download packages from melpa.

It helped me a great deal, and since then I never looked back.

Hope we can convert you to the church of emacs :P

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs7...

I use an approach similar to this [1] to automatically install missing packages on startup. This means that when I move to a new machine I just have to clone the repo with my emacs configuration to have everything ready, settings _and_ extra packages.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10092322/how-to-automatic...

You sound like my coworker. Kevin? Is that you?

How does atom work in a ptty?

Not everybody needs that. Even I as a sysadmin just use TRAMP from within my graphical Emacs to edit remote files and don't open Emacs in an SSH session over a terminal emulator.

> Not everybody needs that.

Didn't suggest they did. But I do.