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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#211

Post by _yosefk »

woodruffw wrote: post #167
lispm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix may have a tradition of small, composable tools. But Unix at the same time has a tradition of large, non-composable and long running tools. The X11 server is such a thing. Many GUI applications under Unix are working that way. From Framemaker to the big gui-based CAD applications. Don't let them tell you that Unix was developed to ONLY run small composable tools and that this is the only true way to use applicat…

X was designed to replace W, which ran on the V System (which is not related to System V or UNIX in general). It does not come from the UNIX tradition - it is a port. Plenty of monolithic software runs on modern Unices, but very few can be traced back to a tradition of monoliths.

What did the Unix tradition of composability though pipes produce though that was more complex than grep, to put it in an exaggerated form? It sorta seems that the classical Unix approach breaks down for big tasks, hence in practice big programs do not follow it. "...and the eulogy was delivered by Perl", as Pike put it.

It's a bit crazy to call Emacs bloated these days; vim is big, too, so is Eclipse, so are most useful programs. I don't like Emacs one bit, but its size is the last thing that bothers me.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#212

Post by rav »

unimpressive wrote: post #191
massysett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Following the links in that article, you find the ADM-3A that inspired the reliance of Vim on the Escape key:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#213

Post by melted »

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…

You simply don't grok vim. Don't know about Emacs, I'm not a Emacs user, but chances are pretty good you don't grok it either. To begin to grok vim, please refer to the following StackOverflow answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#214

Post by amasad »

I switched to emacs a year ago and I love it. I feel a lot more productive when everything I need is in single window. However, just recently, I started feeling what used to be minor RSI to be a major discomfort. There are days where I can't type at all. I don't know if emacs' key bindings is mainly to blame here, but it seems like it. evil-mode have been recommended to me but I'm hesitant because I never liked vim's key bindings.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#215

Post by Sanddancer »

JoachimS wrote: post #207
sklogic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Em…

Slack uses so much memory because it's carrying around the baggage of its own webkit session. It's little more than a web browser that just connects up with slack, and thus has all of the bloat and ugliness of javascript.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#216

Post by qb45 »

amasad wrote: post #214

I switched to emacs a year ago and I love it. I feel a lot more productive when everything I need is in single window. However, just recently, I started feeling what used to be minor RSI to be a major discomfort. There are days where I can't type at all. I don't know if emacs' key bindings is mainly to blame here, but it seems like it. evil-mode have been recommended to me but I'm hesitant because I never liked vim's…

> I never liked vim's key bindings.

How... dare you? Did you really try? What's wrong with them?

I'm finding vi mighty fine. I switched my shells to vi mode and hate going back.

Maybe you need to try Dvorak, I have to admit I've never used vi on QWERTY :)

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#217

Post by lazyjones »

_yosefk wrote: post #211
woodruffw wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X was designed to replace W, which ran on the V System (which is not related to System V or UNIX in general). It does not come from the UNIX tradition - it is a port. Plenty of monolithic software runs on modern Unices, but very few can be traced back to a tradition of monoliths.

What did the Unix tradition of composability though pipes produce though that was more complex than grep, to put it in an exaggerated form? It sorta seems that the classical Unix approach breaks down for big tasks, hence in practice big programs do not follow it. "...and the eulogy was delivered by Perl", as Pike put it. It's a bit crazy to call Emacs bloated these days; vim is big, too, so is Eclipse, so are most us…

> What did the Unix tradition of composability though pipes produce though that was more complex than grep, to put it in an exaggerated form?

netpbm?

Actually, once upon a time, there was a web browser called "Chimera", it used external commands to handle many types of files. For example, it used djpeg to load inline JPEG images.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#218

Post by sklogic »

JoachimS wrote: post #207
sklogic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Em…

To be honest, I very rarely seen 8mb or more back then, when I ran Emacs on a VAXstation with 64mb of ram. Usually it was much less, but, OTOH, org mode did not exist.
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