Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why GNU Emacs?

elephly.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 317 posts

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#11

Post by rekado »

eru wrote: post #6
calibraxis wrote: post #2

"Doing just one thing and doing it well" -- which is better at this, Unix programs or Emacs functions?

At least Unix programs don't suffer from dynamic scope. (Unless you use bash to glue them, of course.)

There are some instances where dynamic scope actually is not as insane as it may seem. Although the paper is probably dated and opinions have changed since then I can still understand that there are practical reasons to dynamic scope in some instances:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html#SEC18

All my own Elisp code uses lexical scoping by default and I don't trust myself enough to use dynamic parameters liberally in my code. But I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to have the ability to dynamically override internals.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#13

Post by avar »

Nowadays the only thing I use outside of Emacs is GNOME Terminal / Google Chrome / bash / screen / ssh. All the rest (including E-Mail) is inside Emacs.

The Emacs/Vim war is a bit silly, because historically they're really not comparable in that way (although vim has gotten larger). Emacs is more of an alternative to GNOME/KDE/Windows/OSX than it is an alternative text editor.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#15

Post by flogic »

Apparently, I'm feeling ranty today...

I've used Vi and Emacs as my primary editor. Now I've moved on to Sublime Text 3. Despite being powerful tools Vi and Emacs have probably harmed the state of Unix text editing. They've kept antiquated UIs from before keyboards were an text editing UIs were standardized. It's kinda sad that MS Dos, Windows and MacOS have all had a plethora of powerful editors with convenient standard user interface meanwhile the Unix world is anchored to Vi and Emacs. It seems like they've managed to starve out a good chunk of innovation on this front.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#16

Post by jake-low »

Once, I used Emacs. All I did with it was play in the land of elisp. I never got any real work done.

Then, a passionate friend converted me to Vim. I only ever used it to do battle with my .vimrc. I never got any real work done.

Now, I use Atom. Click a button, install a feature. No more distractions.

I wish it were faster though; I can never get any real work done.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#17

Post by Scarbutt »

avar wrote: post #13

Nowadays the only thing I use outside of Emacs is GNOME Terminal / Google Chrome / bash / screen / ssh. All the rest (including E-Mail) is inside Emacs. The Emacs/Vim war is a bit silly, because historically they're really not comparable in that way (although vim has gotten larger). Emacs is more of an alternative to GNOME/KDE/Windows/OSX than it is an alternative text editor.

I think the war has move from "Emacs vs Vim" to "Emacs and Vim vs all others".

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#18

Post by FenugreekAcerb »

flogic wrote: post #15

Apparently, I'm feeling ranty today... I've used Vi and Emacs as my primary editor. Now I've moved on to Sublime Text 3. Despite being powerful tools Vi and Emacs have probably harmed the state of Unix text editing. They've kept antiquated UIs from before keyboards were an text editing UIs were standardized. It's kinda sad that MS Dos, Windows and MacOS have all had a plethora of powerful editors with convenient stan…

Yeah or you should install Atom and be spied by Google Analytics [1]. Let's take the creepiness of the web to the desktop.

[1]: https://atom.io/faq

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#19

Post by kstrauser »

flogic wrote: post #15

Apparently, I'm feeling ranty today... I've used Vi and Emacs as my primary editor. Now I've moved on to Sublime Text 3. Despite being powerful tools Vi and Emacs have probably harmed the state of Unix text editing. They've kept antiquated UIs from before keyboards were an text editing UIs were standardized. It's kinda sad that MS Dos, Windows and MacOS have all had a plethora of powerful editors with convenient stan…

I went from Emacs to Sublime and back to Emacs. The UI could be improved, maybe, but there's a lot to be said for knowing that your editor will still exist next year. I'm frankly not confident in ST3, but I'm 100% certain that Emacs will be there.

But beyond that, I find that a lot more stuff Just Works in Emacs. I spend my days working in Python, and both major Python modes for Emacs are miles ahead of ST's equivalents. Things like linters work as expected and there are lot more packages available for niche things. Emacs is subjectively better, even if the UI doesn't feel as platform-native as other editors.

I don't use Emacs because I'm a graybeard afraid to learn something new. I use it because I've tried every new hotness to come along and I've yet to find something as powerful, well-supported, and ubiquitous.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#20

Post by tptacek »

flogic wrote: post #15

Apparently, I'm feeling ranty today... I've used Vi and Emacs as my primary editor. Now I've moved on to Sublime Text 3. Despite being powerful tools Vi and Emacs have probably harmed the state of Unix text editing. They've kept antiquated UIs from before keyboards were an text editing UIs were standardized. It's kinda sad that MS Dos, Windows and MacOS have all had a plethora of powerful editors with convenient stan…

There's a lot of antiquated stuff in Emacs, but despite the almost total lack of a modern UI toolkit for extensions, there are also interfaces in Emacs that are better than anything available elsewhere --- reasons to launch Emacs even if you don't need its expressive power for editing. Magit is a good example, Helm is another, org-mode another, FlyCheck another.

If Emacs looked as good as Sublime, I'd be marginally happier. But if Emacs lost Helm or Magit, I'd be devastated.

Post reply on HN