Live data from Hacker News

Why GNU Emacs?

elephly.net

181–190 of 317 posts

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#182

Many Emacs advocates fall for the trap of apologizing for why Emacs is not Unixy, as though it were some sort of defect. They should celebrate the fact that Emacs doesn't come from the Unix tradition of small, composable tools and "doing only one thing and doing it well". It is rooted in the ambitious work of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, the LISP programming language, and the single user MIT Lisp Machine that…

I always thought of Emacs as my shell. All my UNIXy tools are just piped into this crazy customizable shell's STDIN.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#183

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.

You sound like my coworker. Kevin? Is that you?

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then you have to maintain/monitor that daemon, seems like too much work.

The first line of my ~/.emacs is (start-server). /usr/bin/emacs is launched once and runs forever. I spend nearly all my time in emacs, so there is nothing to maintain/monitor. If emacs dies, it is rather obvious.

I meant (server-start). Doh!

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#185
post #92

I'd love to get started using emacs, but it's extremely difficult. I want to use it to write c++ on Windows. I'd like to have autocompletion support, and navigation support on a large project (>1million lines). I have yet to manage to get it set up. If it were more straightforward to set up and use, more people would use it I'm sure.

Maybe this could help: http://tuhdo.github.io/c-ide.html

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#186
post #74
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…

Once you're past the basic navigation cluster + cut/copy/paste/undo/save (which tend to be more Windows-style, I'd say, than CUA!) every editor is different. Ctrl+F for Find is a common standard, for example, but it's hit or miss whether this is Ctrl+F for Find (and that's your lot! Find & Replace is something entirely different), Ctrl+F for Find (and you have a checkbox for Replace), Ctrl+F for Find (and you have a…

Do you really use one editor for everything?

When I'm working on Python code, I'm in PyCharm. My C++ work on Windows is in Visual Studio. When I ssh into the Linux machine that serves our in-house documentation to make changes, I'm using vim. On OSX, I use BBEDit most of the time. When I'm writing a letter, I'm usually in Word or Google Docs.

I think if I spent all day every day in one environment, I would get bored.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I've never used helm, so I don't have any experience there. I can't say that I've felt like I'm missing anything by not using it though.

I'll give it a try on my system, maybe that will give some insight.

-- update -- I installed a bunch of helm stuff, it didn't slow anything down for me. try doing a clean pull from my repo and then adding your helm packages and see if that helps.

emacs starts up in about 1.2 seconds for me.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#188

> Sometimes people who use computers ask me why I would use something as “bloated” as Emacs for text editing. Usually they remark that Emacs is a hold-over from a by-gone era, much too large compared to editors like “vi”, and that they are quite content using a variant of vi or some Notepad-like editor. This feels like a very out of date sentiment to me. I know a decade ago this was the perception, and well know the…

It's not really large in terms of memory on any remotely modern system.

But it is large in terms of learning curve. Emacs has a ton of concepts and interface quirks that don't transfer to or from other common software. It has it's own keybindings, even it's own way of documenting it's keybindings, that shares no similarity with what the OS considers standard.

So there's a huge amount of pain in switching too or from Emacs.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#189
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both built-in completing read and helm/ivy have their uses. ido is best for when you know what you want and want to get it to it with minimal number of keystrokes. helm seems better for when you want to review many (but not too many) options before deciding on what you want. I find ido unusable for find-file, because of how it splits up directory from filename. So I use the builtin completion. But I rarely op…

I love ido's find-file, but I think that's because I've made it behave much differently than the defaults. The ability to use backspace to go up one full directory, jump to home with ~/ at any point, jump to / with // at any point, and navigate folders quickly with fuzzy matching and RET is really, really nice. To be fair, most of my file opening is done with projectile, which, when you exclude the right files and us…

FWIW, you can do that stuff with helm as well. Except it's C-l to go up a directory by default, IIRC.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#190
post #105
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of them is certified as such?

Who really cares about whether something is "certified" UNIX? Certification is not some seal of quality. "Unix" is commonly understood to denote "functional" unix systems as well for lack of a more convenient term.

That os what the UNIX-like expression is for.
Post reply on HN