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I use vanilla emacs and compile from source straight from master at whatever commit it happens to be in when I decide to do it.

Only once was there a noticeable breakage when a command like `git log` in the terminal would spit out all its output instead of displaying one screenful at a time. I'd expect someone following stable releases wouldn't experience any breakages.

by zelphirkalt1 hours ago|

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I tried Doom or Spacemacs for a while, not sure which one right now. The one that does evil-mode by default. After it crashed a few times inexplicably, I gave up on them and returned to my heavily configured vanilla Emacs, which never crashes. Not sure how the other Emacsen managed to break things and maybe those failures are long fixed by now, but it was quite unfortunate. I imagine other people experiencing such a thing thinking Emacs is unstable.

by globular-toast6 hours ago|

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What "updates" are you referring to? In more than 15 years of using Emacs I've not once been blocked from doing work due to any kind of breakage.

by jr_isidore3 minutes ago|

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He means time passing, aka bitrot. Emacs is designed for quick hacks which often rely on filesystem and shell behaviors outside itself to remain constant.

by jjav5 hours ago|

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Right, I can't understand what this breaking refers to?

I've been using emacs every day all day every time I'm front of a computer, since 1991. I need only one finger to count the pieces of software I've been using that long that have never crashed or broken on me in any way.

by kqr3 hours ago|

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I think it depends on which parts of the ecosystem you use. The org publication/export logic has changed a few times in the past 10 years. If you relied on quirks in that in your configuration you would have had to fix your code to repair it after some upgrades.[1]

I have also run into compatibility issues when using older versions of Emacs with newer packages, and newer Emacs versions with older packages.

[1]: I totally did not build my blog on top of a bunch of these quirks. Every time one of them is fixed I'm reminded of the workflow xkcd. https://m.xkcd.com/1172/

by binary1327 hours ago|

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I’ve come to believe that this is less an emacs problem and more an “emacs plugins that try to do way too much stuff / take too much control” problem. I’m on vanilla emacs (I don’t even use use-package) and my config never breaks any more, even when upgrading major emacs versions. I think it’s about doing things in harmony with the emacs way instead of trying to take over the UI/UX. Emacs Live was always broken when I was using that.

by zelphirkalt1 hours ago|

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use-package is now in standard Emacs, so I would count that towards the Emacs way.

But I agree that it is very stable and for me also doesn't break, even though I use use-package a lot and install many key packages. Maybe it is important to note, that I don't need everything there is out there and that I remove not well working packages quickly after trying them. From time to time I also look at my init file and get rid of no longer used stuff.