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Why GNU Emacs?

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171–180 of 317 posts

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#171
I also love Emacs. I bought an original Emacs Manual for Richard Stallmam (late 1970s?) and still spend a ton of time inside Emacs every day.

I do,use other editors like TextMate and GEdit and the JetBrains IDEs sometimes. Right tool for the job. Emacs really excels for Lisp languages, for me that is Haskell, Common Lisp, Clojure, and Scheme.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#172
post #73
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.

"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." There are ansi-term, shell, and eshell. The first is an actual ansi-term within your emacs, the second is a comint shell, and the third is a shell implemented in elisp. Emacs has frames, and with C-u M-x shell you can open as many new shells as you want. proced is…

All of those pseudo shells are extremely buggy. Try something simple like tab completion in fish in ansi-term, and it's a little difficult to claim it's a true terminal.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#173
post #153
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make sense. You used to be someone easily distracted by yak shaving, is what it reads like. Installing features in Emacs is not exactly tough, either. I do think you can get distracted by the sea of things you can install. Probably no different from the new toys in the realm.

Makes sense to me. I love both emacs and vim, but I agree there are too many yaks to be shaved to get them in a usable state.

I question the lack of shaving in the next application. Seems there is always something that could have been done a different way.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#174
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would instantly disregard anyone who says this. Just run it in daemon mode and connect with emacsclient.

why is that not the default behavior then?

The default behaviour is a bare emacs which starts damn near instantly. If you start adding stuff then it takes time to load, but at this point you should know the daemon is an option.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#175
post #73
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.

"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." There are ansi-term, shell, and eshell. The first is an actual ansi-term within your emacs, the second is a comint shell, and the third is a shell implemented in elisp. Emacs has frames, and with C-u M-x shell you can open as many new shells as you want. proced is…

All of emacs' terminal emulators have been resoundly awful for me. This was probably my biggest disappointment with emacs. I was so looking forward to having the shell be useable from inside emacs, but it's really not.

Now I just use a regular terminal with tmux inside it and emacsclient inside that.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#177
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you reach the escape key?

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#178
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 paramete…

Oh, definitely. Even extremely statically minded Haskell offers a dynamic scoping construct: the reader monad. (As Haskell is wont to do, this monad infects every user of it with a `tag', just like IO does. No silent surprises from dynamic scoping here.)

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#179
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…

On standard UI: The kind of unity of UI I want is a bit more than common cut/copy/paste/save/open shortcuts---for example, using the same incremental search or mark-and-kill-ring-save keystrokes on items in the long pull-down menu or labels in property-editing dialogs...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#180
post #130

I try Emacs around once per year. The problem is it's so slow under OSX. It's much faster on my 2007 iMac running Linux than 2013 mbp. I even tried to run it under X-Quartz but still performed poorly. What can I do?

Turn up the limit on garbage collection made a big difference for me. I'll post my .emacs.d on github and reply here. I'd only make a personal recommendation for emacs if you were doing Clojure development. Emacs+Cider+clj-refactor puts everything else to shame. Otherwise I'd just say use atom or sublime or whatever ide.

Just fyi, I also have huge issues with helm performance on my system. I tried the (setq gc-cons-threshold 100000000) from your init.el, and it didn't help at all.

I'm running emacs 24.5.1 with a recent helm on a 2-core 64-bit Linux system with 8 gigs of RAM. Bringing up helm-mini takes about 7 seconds for me, as does getting a response from helm-apropos when I type a single character or even type control-g to close it.

The rest of emacs runs fine. It's only helm that has anything remotely like this severe performance problem.

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