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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#191

Post by unimpressive »

massysett wrote: post #112
dorfsmay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this, but found that the issue is that most major modes use a "grammar" that make sense to native-emacs user, and ended up fighting with them.

After a day of editing on Emacs on a MacBook Pro, my hands felt like they were going to shrink and stick into a contorted state. So I tried Evil which does work fairly well for editing text. In some ways it's better than Vim--the :substitute is really nice as it shows all pending substitutions in the buffer. But as you said, some major modes work with Evil and others don't, so I'm never sure what I'm going to get. Ir…

>The MIT lab for Emacs probably had nice keyboards.

Oh you have no idea...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_cadet_keyboard

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#192

Post by craigds »

I'm a recent ST3 to Atom convert.

I've used all sorts of text editors with a shell inside them, and I can't quite fathom why you'd want to do that. What's wrong with bash running in iTerm? Then it's a first-class citizen of your desktop instead of a subprocess of a subprocess of a thing running inside another thing running in the one terminal window you're using for everything.

I've tried using vim and emacs a few times, but I can't quite get to grips with the whole modal editor thing. Feels like a whole huge learning curve just for the sake of it, getting in the way of actually getting things done.

My operating system is a perfectly good operating system, I don't need emacs for that.

On the odd occasion when I need to edit something on a remote server (this is very rare, cos ansible/puppet) I'm quite happy using nano. It has zero learning curve (no modes) and the few shortcuts you do need are marked on the bottom of the screen. Yes it's kind of featureless, but you shouldn't be editing things on your servers anyway.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#193

Post by praqzis »

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.

Why have my IDE or developer tools take up all that? Instead, I like to save it to run a 4-node Kubernetes cluster running 8+ Docker containers to have a self contained distributed application locally during development (hey, it works on the airplane too when totally disconnected from a network).

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#194

Post by cryon »

Emacs have been my main editor for 15 years soon and while it definitely got some rough edges, once you learn all basic key-combinations for editing and buffer management (which often is even more uncomfortable with a non us keyboard layout) I feel that nothing else really compare. Text editing is great but as many have pointed out the extensibility and all the high quality community projects/modes out there make emacs something unique. I don't think it's wrong to regard emacs more as an elisp environment than an editor.

The biggest problem with emacs right now as I see it is the lack of multi-threading.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#195

Post by gcommer »

criddell wrote: post #186
to3m wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Do you really use one editor for everything?

Yes, at least whenever possible.

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

The opposite perspective: It's extremely frustrating constantly switching between significantly different environments with different UIs, different hotkeys, subtly different jargon, etc.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#196

Post by terminalcommand »

jake-low wrote: post #16

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 might be interested in this amazing tutorial. It shows how to configure emacs to download packages from melpa.

It helped me a great deal, and since then I never looked back.

Hope we can convert you to the church of emacs :P

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs7...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#197

Post by kiiski »

sigjuice wrote: post #152
dominotw wrote: post #81

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.

Personally I just always start emacs with `emacsclient -c -a=`. If no emacs daemon is running, it starts a new one and connects to it.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#198

Post by flogic »

bch wrote: post #21
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…

Not trying to be confrontational, but conversational -- I'd say that both vi and Emacs have solid fundamentals and have stuck with a model that works, to their credit. I must admit that I shop around for editors occasionally (I'm a long-time emacs person, who swapped back to vi a few years ago to re-develop his vi-fu), but I haven't seen anything so compelling that I've switched to anything else. It may well be that…

My primary issue with Vi and Emacs isn't really about lack. They are quite powerful tools. The primary problem is that they impose a certain amount of mental overhead. Emacs was a bit worse in that regard since many of its key bindings are actually sequences. Sublime Text is rather powerful but in terms of features it's probably the one that is lacking of the 3. The win was in unloading the overhead from my normal work patterns.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#199

Post by mrighele »

syrrim wrote: post #150
ufo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is that not the default behavior then?

Because it would take up memory from everyone, including non-emacs users.

I think that the best default approach would be to start as a normal emacs process but revert to emacsclient behaviour (i.e. just open a new frame) if a running instance of emacs is detected. This is what web browsers do, for example.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#200

Post by mrighele »

terminalcommand wrote: post #196
jake-low wrote: post #16

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 might be interested in this amazing tutorial. It shows how to configure emacs to download packages from melpa. It helped me a great deal, and since then I never looked back. Hope we can convert you to the church of emacs :P https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs7...

I use an approach similar to this [1] to automatically install missing packages on startup. This means that when I move to a new machine I just have to clone the repo with my emacs configuration to have everything ready, settings _and_ extra packages.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10092322/how-to-automatic...

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