- Having Emacs suspend the shell I'm working in sucks
- Getting names of files to actually appear as buffers, without extra gorp like a listener window that I don't care about at all is an exercise in frustration
... and more, but I need to find the last .emacs file that I spent half a day hacking up for details (and don't get me started on the geometry nonsense you need to control where Emacs starts up and how big its window is, and how well this plays with environments that have different monitor sizes and . . . oh bog, it can be better).
Inevitably someone's going to argue about how Emacs should be used ("you're supposed to get into it and never leave" and similar nonsense), or point out that I can customize away the things I hate. True. But I've been using Emacs since 1979 or so, and it just seems much worse in the last ten years.
I probably would've been inclined to argue about how Emacs "should" be used, but I'm not about to presume so with someone who's been using it for two years longer than I've been alive.
If you're inclined to amplify on your perspective of how Emacs has changed over time, I'd be delighted to hear anything you have to say on the subject. It's so much more powerful than anything else I've ever used that I'm still very much in the honeymoon phase despite having used Emacs as my sole editor for almost a half decade now; I would value most highly the privilege of hearing from someone with a more experienced and balanced understanding, such as yours.
I'm not entirely sure I follow. Is it that toolbars and menubars themselves suck, or the particular ones in emacs? (fwiw, I have them disabled and don't feel like I'm missing much. Reenable them every now and then to explore the "promoted" options of modes.)
I'm inclined to agree with the shell thing, though that is more of a property of the shell, isn't it?
And you've lost me on the names of files. What do you mean?
I certainly don't think you are using it wrong. I am extremely interested in how things have gotten worse. In particular, examples of how things were better would really help to understand. (And, no, you don't owe this to anyone. I would appreciate it, though.)
Failing that, backgrounding the process at launch (by appending & to the invocation) should stop it blocking the shell from which it's launched.
While I did mean what I said earlier about not feeling qualified to argue with someone who's been using Emacs since before I was even a gleam in my father's eye, I do want to point out that it's maybe sort of unfair to blame this one on Emacs; any process you launch from a shell, which doesn't immediately perform a detaching fork from its parent process (as most things don't), is going to have the same effect, and require the same modified invocation to prevent blocking your shell.
