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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#231

Post by rekado »

gkya wrote: post #91
benaiah wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is actually having a bit of a renaissance - ever since package.el came out and became widely adopted, Emacs adoption seems to have increased significantly, and Emacs development is quite active these days.

And 25 is near and with xwidget support, i.e. embedding things like a Webkit instance in a buffer. I guess I will be able to "exec emacs --debug-init" in my .xsession soon.

There is EXWM, an X window manager for Emacs: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

Here are some screenshots: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm/wiki/Screenshots

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#232

Post by snaky »

gkya wrote: post #91
benaiah wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is actually having a bit of a renaissance - ever since package.el came out and became widely adopted, Emacs adoption seems to have increased significantly, and Emacs development is quite active these days.

And 25 is near and with xwidget support, i.e. embedding things like a Webkit instance in a buffer. I guess I will be able to "exec emacs --debug-init" in my .xsession soon.

Actually you can - http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager....

All you need to do is to set up a couple of hotkeys for things that Emacs cannot do (yet), like (start-process "" nil "xdg-open" "http://some.flashy.javascript.website")

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#233

Post by __david__ »

mrighele wrote: post #199
syrrim wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Luckily, all that takes is:

   alias emacs="emacsclient -a '' -c"
But you're right, I wish that were the default.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#234

Post by gkya »

sooheon wrote: post #172
gkya wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Well, it's about how one approaches computing. I try to do most without a shell, using async-shell-command and elisp tools in general. But if you're a sysadmin I use shell iff I have to. tmux has many things to offer, which you should use.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#235

Post by snaky »

Tistel wrote: post #86

lisp is beautiful. The crown jewels of computer science. getting to spend time with it reminds you that programming can be fun (and profound) while you are being paid to work with some awful drudgery language solving some stupid problem. Being close to lisp, in this way, is like being at the same party as Audrey Hepburn. It reminds you of grace.

Joel Moses has been credited with coining the phrase in the 1970s

APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#236

Post by progman »

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…

The first thing every Emacs user should learn is how to customize key bindings. With global-set-key you can assign arbitrary keys (function keys etc.) to arbitrary commands. Of course you have to learn Elisp for that but that's not too hard. It is worth the effort to learn the basics of Elisp if you want to become really productive in Emacs.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ke...

Emacs is the most advanced programmable editor ever, and that's the reason why it is still alive. I use it every day for almost thirty years. Of course I don't use the default configuration but a very conventient custom one.

In Unix you just need to know just two editors - Emacs and vi. Vi because it is the default editor on every Unix platform. At first vi's key bindings looked crazy but after a while they felt just natural.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#238

Post by progman »

snaky wrote: post #235
Tistel wrote: post #86

lisp is beautiful. The crown jewels of computer science. getting to spend time with it reminds you that programming can be fun (and profound) while you are being paid to work with some awful drudgery language solving some stupid problem. Being close to lisp, in this way, is like being at the same party as Audrey Hepburn. It reminds you of grace.

Joel Moses has been credited with coining the phrase in the 1970s APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.

> Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.

Such claims are usually made by people who haven't discovered the power of Lisp yet.

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#239

Post by pjmlp »

qznc wrote: post #222
pjmlp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every (Unix/terminal) shell is a Read-Eval-Print-Loop. The difference is the data structure which is passed around. Is it bytes, Cons, or objects?

No, every UNIX shell is a poor Read-Eval-Print-Loop when compared to what Xerox PARC machines allowed in terms of interaction with the running OS.

UNIX shells don't allow to call functions declared in .so, execute scripts applied to elements selected with the mouse, apply functional algorithms over data.

Well, you can write external commands in another programming language, but then it isn't a REPL anymore.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#240

Post by liotier »

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".

So, JSON passed between a bunch of Javascript things from Github means that the browser is the new EMACS ?
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