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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#241

Post by yvdriess »

liotier wrote: post #240
gkya wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Maybe if it would be sending AST in JSON, not recommended though :)

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#242

Post by rekado »

kop316 wrote: post #145

Out of curiosity, I have tried Vi and Emacs, but the CLI text editor I have gone back to is GNU nano. Am I missing something?

It depends on what you want to do and what you expect. As I wrote in my blog post, Emacs is more to me than just a text editor, just like a browser is more to many people than just an HTML viewer.

I don't use Emacs on the command line; I use a graphical instance. I usually only have two programmes open: Emacs and a graphical browser (eww still needs some work).

Being able to use my very own Emacs that has been molded according to my habits for pretty much every task is a great feature, but it only becomes obvious after some time of continued usage.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#243

Post by lispm »

progman wrote: post #238
snaky wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In this case, Joel Moses could easily know more about Lisp than we both together... probably he speaks from deep experience.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#244

Post by jarcane »

liotier wrote: post #240
gkya wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

The article more or less makes this precise comparison.

"Do everything in Emacs" isn't really so different from "Do everything in the browser."

Arguably, modern browsers are more heavyweight and complex at that. They certainly eat a hell of a lot more RAM than my Emacs ever does.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#245

Post by dragandj »

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…

But you can reconfigure your keyboard however you like it. Try recommendataions from Ergonomic Emacs.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#246

Post by ExceptionRaised »

dorfsmay wrote: post #83
bjackman wrote: post #8

I enjoyed this; I moved from Vim to Emacs a couple of years ago and indeed the most important thing to recognise is this: Emacs does have a great text editor, and it's Vim! With evil-mode you can use all the Vim bindings you're used to (including sed commands with ':'), but with the added benefits (and drawbacks) of Emacs! I've also found that fiddling with my .emacs is really fun, fiddling with .vimrc was usually qu…

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.

Take a look at spacemacs (sorry, no link, I'm on mobile). It's got a lot of cool features, but most importantly the "layers" (an abstraction on top of modes and packages) all have evil-ified keybindings.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#247

Post by kqr »

pmoriarty wrote: post #164
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.

I used vim for 20 years before switching to emacs. I'd actually tried switching twice. Firt time with viper (I think), which didn't have good enough vim emulation. Second time evil-mode finally convinced me to switch completely. Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything,…

You're absolutely right that it takes a bunch of time to set Emacs up initially. I took a week off work for unrelated reasons and spent a few evenings of that time to set up Emacs with evil-mode and it was totally worth it. However, I did put off doing it for over a year before that, because I didn't have the time to spend.

An important realisation was that I only need my Emacs to do the basic Vim things and then some extensions I commonly use. At that point, I can survive using only Emacs and building onto it as I feel like I need something.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#248

Post by shanth »

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…

> "doing only one thing and doing it well".

Emacs does only one thing. And does that one thing very well - "Extensibility"

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#249

Post by auganov »

liotier wrote: post #240
gkya wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

As funny as that comparison sounds - browsers are an amazing environment/system. If we ever abandon the Browser for more opaque systems I'm sure it will be remembered the way we remember Lisp machines today.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#250

Post by mundanevoice »

jarcane wrote: post #244
liotier wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article more or less makes this precise comparison. "Do everything in Emacs" isn't really so different from "Do everything in the browser." Arguably, modern browsers are more heavyweight and complex at that. They certainly eat a hell of a lot more RAM than my Emacs ever does.

True, But they also do much more things than Emacs does.
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