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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#51

Post by pjmlp »

MarcScott wrote: post #28
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…

Given that all these editors are cross-platform, I don't see how the continued development of Emacs could be starving out innovation in the Unix world.

Many on UNIX seem to keep living as if their quad-core with 16GB is actually a better PDP-11, hence starving innovation.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#52

Post by TeMPOraL »

alkonaut wrote: post #43
merpnderp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I won't use an IDE > a regex real fast to mass update code For things like renaming, an IDE would have a function for that, which isn't text based but symbolic . At the very least, bringing up a replace diaglog with regex functionality doesn't require any more keys to be pressed in an IDE than in emacs. Most IDEs's also support key bindings that are pretty close to Emacs or vim. unless you use a dynamic language in…

Symbolic renames are one thing, but sometimes you really want to do textual renames. When you have names like fooFrobnicator, barFrobnicatorFactory and quuxFrobnicatorController, and you want to rename Frobnicator to Twiddler, symbolic rename won't help you.

Also, you can create quite a lot of code indirectly by few well-placed keystrokes that utilize multiple cursors / keyboard macros, regexp-replaces and things like this. Think of it as chiseling out an entire block of code at once. Spend little time mastering those features, and you can do things like this on the fly, without much conscious focus.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#53

Post by agumonkey »

Emacs grabbed my attention soon [1], I used to spend a huge amount of time on almost all aspects of it. Now, I don't care[2]. Turns out editors are a waste of time, at least if you consider them so[3]. Brilliant algorithms are short in characters.

That said, Emacs is a full fledged system giving you a lot[4], if you're willing and able to use that lever you'll be happy. Lastly, Emacs survived for decades, it can swallow most interesting ideas that comes (ligthtable ? checked https://github.com/Fuco1/litable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNO-vgq3Avg).

----

[1] It's syntactic system is powerful enough to feel different and more solid (important) than other editors at the time (before Eclipse and IDEA). It was repl-friendly, another factor that talked to my mind.

[2] It's still the 2nd most used program on my machine after chromium .. maybe even a tie.

[3] Learn hard things, fundamentals (parsing, compilation, optimization, paradigms), learn how to help yourself (see G.Bernhardt talk about unix chainsaw[3]) in all possible ways.

[4] its open keybinding trie is still something that I miss in most programs and I try to port a subset of it everytime I design a UI. It's also based on a lisp, so enjoy using alien tools from the future. Btw, its git interface (magit) blows Eclipse one out of the water for instance, most people wouldn't suspect how efficient it is compared to heavy 'pro' tools.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#54

Post by qnaal »

rakel_rakel wrote: post #44

The boilerplate argument against emacs is getting kinda old, isn't it? I used vim exclusively for ~5 years up until last summer when I switched to emacs which I use in more or less the same way, edit something, ctrl-z out to the shell, fix something, fg back to emacs etc... I find the ~2 second startup time for the times when I don't run it as a daemon negligible, and imho it's easily worth it at least if you make us…

> Also the lacking a decent text-editor joke is just that, a joke

well, noone's saying that viper-mode couldn't be improved

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#56

Post by pjmlp »

elviejo wrote: post #33
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.

They were already so in the 90's.

While at the university I had to settle with Emacs, because there wasn't any IDE available that could offer me the experience Borland tools had.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
MarcScott wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that all these editors are cross-platform, I don't see how the continued development of Emacs could be starving out innovation in the Unix world.

Many on UNIX seem to keep living as if their quad-core with 16GB is actually a better PDP-11, hence starving innovation.

Well, if those quad-cores and 16GB of RAM would actually be put to good use in the "modern"/"hot" IDE world, we could talk. If anything is starving out innovation, it's sticking to CUA, mouse-driven development and rewriting nano in JavaScript...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

rakel_rakel wrote: post #44

The boilerplate argument against emacs is getting kinda old, isn't it? I used vim exclusively for ~5 years up until last summer when I switched to emacs which I use in more or less the same way, edit something, ctrl-z out to the shell, fix something, fg back to emacs etc... I find the ~2 second startup time for the times when I don't run it as a daemon negligible, and imho it's easily worth it at least if you make us…

SSDs are magic. I've pretty much stopped noticing Emacs startup time after I switched to them.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

elviejo wrote: post #33
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.

I like to view it as the Cold War - Emacs and Vi being the superpowers, and the rest struggling to get by ;).
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