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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#201

Post by rekado »

losvedir wrote: post #46

> 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 This feels like a very out of date sentiment to me.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…

> This feels like a very out of date sentiment to me.

Yes! It's as if these sentiments were not actually experienced by those who propagate them. It's cultural baggage.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#202

Post by Bogdanp »

sooheon wrote: post #170
MarcScott wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a true terminal inside emacs that I don't know about, because all the ones I've tried were buggy chimeras of odd behaviours.

`ansi-term` works well in most cases. The only time it really breaks down for me is when I run commands that combine really long lines and complex escape sequences (like npm's new progress bar which you can thankfully disable).

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#203

Post by mbrock »

praqzis wrote: post #193
pjmlp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

8 Docker containers isn't really saying much. I'm running 20 on my cheap VPS right now. They're just processes...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#204

Post by josteink »

dominotw wrote: post #81
jdreaver wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to run emacs IMO is to use "emacs --daemon" to spawn a single daemon process, and then connect to it using emacsclient. Then, startup time is instant!

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

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

This thread over at reddit may kill your concerns :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/45mtdz/can_someone_e...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#205

Post by mbrock »

eru wrote: post #178
rekado wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Implicit parameters, too.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#206

Post by pjmlp »

praqzis wrote: post #193
pjmlp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

To be able to enjoy a computing experience as envisioned by Xerox PARC and Olivetti, not AT&T.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#207

Post by JoachimS »

sklogic wrote: post #61
losvedir wrote: post #46

> 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…

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.

Yes, that was very funny - about 20 years ago.

On my current machine (OSX w 16 GByte RAM), Emacs built with Homebrow as native GUI application (HEAD, lots of bells and extras enabled) with 10+ buffers Emacs consumes 127 MBytes. In comparison, Finder consumes 300+ MByte, Firefox 2+ GBytes and Slack(!) 500+ MBytes. And the Activity Monitor utility supplied by Apple I used to check these numbers uses 130 MBytes.

Yes, Emacs consumes 8 MBytes and more. But Moore's law has really fixed that problem. And in comparison with a lot of other SW, Emacs is not the SW application I would accuse for being bloated, quite the opposite in fact.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#208

Post by pjmlp »

gkya wrote: post #65
infodroid wrote: post #49

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…

Unix has a big flaw: through the pipes pass random data. It's up to the receivers to interpret it. Lisp gives you the possibility to easily structure your data and pass it around, plus the ability to pass programs around. Other than this, the unix way and the lisp way are nearly parallel, though in lisp "command line utility" is called a "procedure".

Hence why I love the idea of REPL as shell as used in the Xerox PARC and ETHZ OSes.

Only Powershell comes closer to how this was used.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#209

Post by JoachimS »

trothamel wrote: post #103
melling wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fits in level 3 cache these days: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-i7-nehalem-cpu,204...

Yes, but if you want to do something else with your computer, you'd have to swap it out to proper RAM.

You mean like how it normally works? Of course it will be swapped out - into the GBytes of memory you oomputer is equipped with.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#210

Post by pjmlp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

When those IDEs are able to achieve what was possible in Xerox PARC workstations, as demoed occasionally by Bret Victor, then we can talk about moving forward.

PDP-11 command line experience is not even there.

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