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Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

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Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#171

Post by tmtvl »

wging wrote: post #89

I'd really prefer for emacs' implementation language to have been a lisp-1 rather than a lisp-2. It's annoying to have to do different things to treat a function as a value (put it into a list, assign it to a variable, etc.), as opposed to all other kinds of data. Any benefit you get from allowing name collisions (i.e. function named f, related but distinct variable also named f) seems very small in all elisp code I'…

My introduction to Lisp was through SICP and Scheme so I used to be in favour of Lisp-1, but having used Common Lisp for a while now I've changed my mind. Treating a function as a value is easy enough:

  (mapcar #'list list)
It's like how if you want to treat a symbol as data you have to quote it:

  (let ((x 2))
    (list 1 x 'x))

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#172

Post by znpy »

I’d keep the possibility to use the ide both in the console as well as in a graphical environment for sure.

I’m not sure i’d change the scripting language, despite all of its shortcomings it has proven itself way more than enough.

Maybe better concurrency?

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#173

Post by az09mugen »

lr0 wrote: post #125

Almost all the comments here are about things that really possible to do in current Emacs i.e. 'feature-requests' and not "fundamental pitfalls of this foundational application". For me, it would be just: - Redesigned with concurrency in mind. - Common Lisp, Scheme, or anything else other than Elisp. [Just the same way Neovim adapted Lua instead of VimScript] - More sane defaults for new users.

Someone created lem [0] which is basically an Emacs in Common Lisp. I don't know for concurrency but I hope it is designed to do so. Also there isn't org-mode.

[0] : https://github.com/lem-project/lem

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#174

Post by znpy »

musicale wrote: post #68
lysace wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. On the modern devices I've recently used emacs on (including very low-powered raspberry pi devices), all of your three criteria are already true. What kind of HW are you running emacs on where this isn't the case?

This is from 2015, but emacs still has higher typing latency than vim in 2024. https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ If you have better numbers and comparisons for emacs keypress-to-pixel latency, etc. I'd be interested. Note classic vi started up faster than vim. Device makes little to no difference: Raspberry Pi 5, MacBook Pro M1, ThinkPad P1, etc. - emacs is clunky on all of them. I like emacs and it's my d…

I have often see some fellow coworkers start up their fairly complex vim/neovim/other-vim setups and quite frankly… they ended up recreating a poor emacs implementation.

Yeah it’s faster at starting up but it’s worse in pretty much everything else.

Oh and they end up typing Ctrl-this Ctrl-that anyway.

Might as well use gnu emacs.

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#175

Post by kanodiaashu »

I would 1. Make it more capable as a full GUI - currently I have trouble displaying jupyter notebooks with images/progress bars etc in it. 2. Make an 'emacs app store' where you can get paid plugins (I'm going for Cursor). 3. Make collaborative editing possible.

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#176

Post by tmtvl »

dokyun wrote: post #161
nabla9 wrote: post #3

- Use Common Lisp instead of Emacs Lisp. - Design a more modular architecture to make it easier to extend and maintain different components. - Design a more robust plugin system for development and distribution of extensions. - Implement better sandboxing and security measures for extensions. - Better APIs for extension developers. - better multi-threading support baked into the editor.

> - Implement better sandboxing and security measures for extensions. Why, pray tell, should this be of any concern at all? Sandboxing is used when the host is concerned about running programs that he doesn't trust. There is no reason that an Emacs package would require security measures around it, unless it were knowingly potentially malware. The only reality in which I could see this is if people were using proprie…

Well, Emacs does ship with a browser (because of course it does, that kind of thing is what makes Emacs so amazing) and we all remember the XZ Utils near-backdoor, so I think that security measures would be useful for people who decide to use a less trustworthy archive like MELPA or who install extensions with package-vc.

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#177

Post by anthk »

az09mugen wrote: post #173
lr0 wrote: post #125

Almost all the comments here are about things that really possible to do in current Emacs i.e. 'feature-requests' and not "fundamental pitfalls of this foundational application". For me, it would be just: - Redesigned with concurrency in mind. - Common Lisp, Scheme, or anything else other than Elisp. [Just the same way Neovim adapted Lua instead of VimScript] - More sane defaults for new users.

Someone created lem [0] which is basically an Emacs in Common Lisp. I don't know for concurrency but I hope it is designed to do so. Also there isn't org-mode. [0] : https://github.com/lem-project/lem

More than org-mode, it needs a Texinfo viewer. Once you can access SBCL's documentation (and internal docs), now you have an almost complete Common Lisp editor with the basic features from Emacs.

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#178

Post by anthk »

randmeerkat wrote: post #147
throwaway17_17 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree that these are true ‘fundamental pitfalls’ of Emacs’ design. However I may go further on your third point. I would like to see a dedicated new user/learner mode that in addition to saner defaults would be pretty fully configured and pre-loaded with the most common extensions/plug-ins/etc. This could then lead to development of dedicated documentation/tutorials that assist the new user in becoming proficien…

> I would like to see a dedicated new user/learner mode “To run the tutorial, start Emacs and type C-h t, that is, Ctrl-h followed by t.”[1] [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

That can be just put in the startup screen.

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#179

Post by anthk »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #141
lr0 wrote: post #125

Almost all the comments here are about things that really possible to do in current Emacs i.e. 'feature-requests' and not "fundamental pitfalls of this foundational application". For me, it would be just: - Redesigned with concurrency in mind. - Common Lisp, Scheme, or anything else other than Elisp. [Just the same way Neovim adapted Lua instead of VimScript] - More sane defaults for new users.

Hard agree that these are true ‘fundamental pitfalls’ of Emacs’ design. However I may go further on your third point. I would like to see a dedicated new user/learner mode that in addition to saner defaults would be pretty fully configured and pre-loaded with the most common extensions/plug-ins/etc. This could then lead to development of dedicated documentation/tutorials that assist the new user in becoming proficien…

I'm against that. Some random user would use Org-Mode and it wouldn't need any IDE related extensions. Also, another programmer might just use Org-Babel and code in Common Lisp with org-babel and a REPL doing literary programming. Another one would use Emacs for IRC, Email and math with M-x calc and/or iMaxima and AucTex.

Re: Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?

#180

Post by anthk »

rbc wrote: post #98

One thing about Emacs, is it's not really just an editor anymore. Comparing it to other editors kind of misses the mark. It's more like an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. It reminds me of Smalltalk environments, say Squeak or Pharo, albeit in a very text oriented way. The world could probably make room for an integrated Lisp development environment that makes GUI programming more of a first class…

Emacs runs on terminals too. If you want GUI's, you can choose Common Lisp with Lem and MCCLIM, or that newish web oriented GUI with a similar environment.
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