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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#31

Post by MarcScott »

jamespo wrote: post #23
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…

A lot of the reason I used emacs is that it works in a terminal... nothing else with its power does.

While on the other hand, I use it because I can open a shell from within Emacs.

I can also use tramp to ssh onto another machine from within emacs, and so don't have to bother installing my favourite editor on headless servers and Raspberry Pis.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#32

Post by oblio »

kstrauser wrote: post #19
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 equivale…

The thing is, in this day and age most people don't need their editor to last 100 years. Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access & friends, you can just switch to another editor.

Meanwhile, if you're used to Vi's modal editing or Emacs's elisp, you're basically going to hate the other tools forever if for whatever reason. For example if you need IDE features for your project or the Vim/Emacs extensions for language X are no stable/flexible enough.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#33

Post by elviejo »

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.

"how have times changed before the enemies were Emacs vs Vi. Now Emacs and Vim are allies against visual studio and eclipse." read long ago in Hnews comment.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#34

Post by WizardOfTheWest »

FenugreekAcerb wrote: post #18
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

Thankfully, for Arch and Arch derivatives, the AUR package removes this before building.

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=atom-...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#35

Post by merpnderp »

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 won't use an IDE on OSX or windows that doesn't support VIM or Emacs key bindings because I'm not an animal that wants to take his fingers off the line to use the mouse or arrow keys every time needs to move the cursor (or run a regex real fast to mass update code).

Luckily there are VIM bindings for nearly every single IDE of importance out there.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#36

Post by benaiah »

tptacek wrote: post #20
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 h…

Helm may be the most flagrant example of a terrible package that remains inexplicably popular. I haven't uninstalled it yet, because there are a few packages that use helm that don't have ido equivalents yet, but I try to minimize my usage of it as much as possible. Issues include:

- Significant performance issues

- Constant bugs - updates often break the package completely, especially if you're using the melpa version (melpa is another rant for another time - standard melpa is totally brain-dead)

- An atrocious version of "fuzzy matching" (you have to separate terms with spaces, which are then turned into ".asterisk" (can't type a single asterisk in HN comments) and everything's concatenated into a regex to match)

- The default helm-mode (what they recommend using for completing-read, which controls execute-extended-command, i.e. M-x, and such) is unsorted. Not badly sorted - unsorted.

- Doesn't use a lot of the standard layout functions, instead replacing them with its own stuff that can't be customized in a standard way.

- Dictatorial maintainers that only allows options and features that they deem the "right way" to do it. This is fine for some projects, but total control of my editing experience is the primary reason I use Emacs in the first place.

ido with a few simple plugins is vastly better, less buggy, more compatible, faster, has better matching, and is easier to customize. I recommend against using helm for completing-read unequivocally.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#37

Post by merpnderp »

oblio wrote: post #32
kstrauser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equivale…

The thing is, in this day and age most people don't need their editor to last 100 years. Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access & friends, you can just switch to another editor. Meanwhile, if you're used to Vi's modal editing or Emacs's elisp, you're basically going to hate the other tools forever if for whatever reason. For example if you need IDE features for your project or the Vim/Emacs e…

Nearly every IDE of importance has either a full VIM plugin or is working hard on it. Not having to take your hands off the keyboard line to hit the arrows or mouse is a big deal to a lot of devs. Having easy and powerful regex is nearly as important. And having buffers is probably a close number three.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#38

Post by losvedir »

kstrauser wrote: post #19
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 equivale…

> 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.

This is misleading. In the era of JetBrains and its perpetual licensing and Steam and whatnot, it's worth pointing out that ST3 is a binary that you download and have complete access to, so of course it will be there next year.

You're probably getting at the fact that development may stop on it next year, and that's true, but the product is still pretty polished and useful now.

I also don't have your confidence that Emacs will always be there. I don't have statistics - but have contributions been increasing or decreasing in the last decade? In any case, I hope that Emacs fades away: text editing is great, but I think there's still plenty of room to advance our craft. Things like Lamdu and Eve (nee Light Table) are interesting explorations.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#39

Post by benaiah »

losvedir wrote: post #38
kstrauser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equivale…

> 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. This is misleading. In the era of JetBrains and its perpetual licensing and Steam and whatnot, it's worth pointing out that ST3 is a binary that you download and have complete access to, so of course it will be there n…

Emacs is actually having a bit of a renaissance - ever since package.el came out and became widely adopted, Emacs adoption seems to have increased significantly, and Emacs development is quite active these days.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#40

Post by jontammeh »

Emacs is in one sense the canonical computer program. A "historical landmark" of computing, the internet, and our industry.

It's grown, it's still viable and used heavily. Even if you don't use it, it's sort of the Aristotle of computer programs - we owe it a lot.

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