I probably would have never got into Emacs at all if I had to start with vanilla.
Very interesting. I assume this is due to the amount of effort that would have been required for it to acquire some of the functionality you were expecting out of it. Am I right?
IMO Lisp is what makes Emacs great, and vimscript is (was?) an absolute nightmare for anything complex. I don’t think lua is a bad language, but I’ll still take Lisp any day for this purpose.
This is actually a great point that I somehow completely ignored so far. I intend to put my teeth in GNU Guix at some point in the future. As Guile Scheme and Lisp are -to my knowledge- at least in some way related, using Emacs should at least provide an excellent platform for me to get accustomed to what it is yet to come. Thanks for mentioning that!
What I described isn’t using containers. Nix just provides an environment for processes to run in, and direnv-mode ensures it’s using the right environment for a given buffer in Emacs. So for example I don’t have OmniSharp or dotnet in my user $PATH, but they are provided by the nix expression in a particular project directory. That allows lsp-mode to start OmniSharp as a language server, or I can run dotnet build using the Emacs compile command.
That sounds very compelling! Thanks for that insight! Perhaps I should stop procrastinating and get on with learning Nix 😅.
You can define containers with nix and manage them with nixos-container. I do that for testing server deployments, or running sandboxed services, but I’ve never needed something that complex for a dev shell.