I would like to add that customizing/extending Eclipse has become a nightmare. Two of my plugins stopped working in 4.x. Took forever to get a simple Nature and Builder working again under 4.x.

Eclipse's uses XML to declare UI, behavior, expressions. Completely baffling. Terrible docs. Extremely difficult to debug. I was reduced to trial and error (after copying working examples I found).

I've used Eclipse since the early alphas. Its muscle memory.

Scouting the plugin dev stuff of IntelliJ, it doesn't appear to suck so mightily. I've forced myself to start using IntelliJ.

I miss LISP so much I could cry. Even so, I remain wary of metaprogramming. And I very much want to do plugin dev, vs modifying the runtime, for the separation of concerns. I've had to customize all-in-one runtimes and borking the whole runtime with a bad override is not fun to debug.

I've not done emacs plugins, so can't comment or compare.

> I miss LISP so much I could cry. Even so, I remain wary of metaprogramming. And I very much want to do plugin dev, vs modifying the runtime, for the separation of concerns. I've had to customize all-in-one runtimes and borking the whole runtime with a bad override is not fun to debug.

Your concerns are artificial! Let go of your concerns and be free. The hundreds of Emacs users around the world are already doing it. It's great.

It used to be a bit of a wild-west without lexical binding but we have that now and it's going over pretty well. Fewer libraries step on each others' toes as adoption spreads.

We have package management built-in. We have awesome introspection and debugging tools. There are a lot of wonderful built-in packages.

My init file isn't even written in raw elisp anymore. I use a well-documented org file. The amazing org-babel library is bundled in. My init file is written for humans to understand and only incidentally for my editor to execute. It's great.

I only wish more software was designed this way.

> My init file isn't even written in raw elisp anymore. I use a well-documented org file. The amazing org-babel library is bundled in. My init file is written for humans to understand and only incidentally for my editor to execute. It's great.

Came here to say that I do this, too: https://github.com/nhoffman/.emacs.d

Not sure if it was worth the effort, but it was fun!

I do this too. I got the idea from Sacha Chua:

http://sachachua.com/blog/2012/06/literate-programming-emacs...

Ooh, `copy-and-comment` looks super useful. Pulling that one into my own, thanks!

Do you happen t have your dot files up on github by any chance? Would love to take a look at how you setup your init files with org-babel.