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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#251

Post by infodroid »

lispm wrote: post #116
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 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…

I think what makes a tradition is the work that is in the original spirit of the project [1], not the exceptions to it.

I would argue that the original developers of Unix over at Bell Labs were horrified at X and the "monolithic" applications that were being developed for Unix.

So much so that they wrote an entirely new operating system, Plan 9 that pushed composability to a new level and also included its own windowing system called 8½ (which was rewritten later as Rio).

Rob Pike had this to say about 8½ [2]:

> The entire system, including the default program that runs in the window — the equivalent of xterm pasting between windows — is well under 90 kilobytes of text on a Motorola 68020 processor, about half the size of the operating system kernel that supports it and a tenth the size of the X server without xterm... The small size of 8½ does not reflect reduced functionality: 8½ provides service roughly equivalent to the X window system. 8½’s clients may of course be as complex as they choose, although the tendency to mimic 8½’s design and the clean programming interface means they are not nearly as bloated as X.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy [2] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#252

Post by gpderetta »

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.

I'm eagerly waiting for the day I can use emacs as my window manager.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#253

Post by tempodox »

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…

You practically took the words out of my mouth. I was about to say that for gainful emacs usage, all I need is a Lisp machine. But since Unix is the reality, I'm staying with vim.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#254

Post by [deleted] »

jjnoakes wrote: post #177
merpnderp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly every IDE of importance has either a full VIM plugin or is working hard on it. Not having to take your hands off the keyboard line to hit the arrows or mouse is a big deal to a lot of devs. Having easy and powerful regex is nearly as important. And having buffers is probably a close number three.

How do you reach the escape key?

[deleted]

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#255

Post by tempodox »

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".

Emacs has a big flaw: It's just too fucking complicated and inconsistent. Unix, otoh, can do everything emacs does AND it has a half-decent text editor (vim).

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#256

Post by tempodox »

mundanevoice wrote: post #250
jarcane wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you really believe that you haven't understood emacs at all.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#257

Post by jjnoakes »

rodelrod wrote: post #226
jjnoakes wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reach the escape key?

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Avoid_the_escape_key Personally, mapping Caps Lock to Ctrl (which I do anyway) and using Ctrl-C works best. I use vim and IntelliJ's vim emulation on an international keyboard where Ctrl-[ won't work.

So the entire argument about not moving one's hands is moot then, since in emacs you get navigation via control-key for free, and in vi you need to remap the most important key to something near home row.

Got it. Thanks.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#258

Post by edoloughlin »

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

It was so ahead of its time, it even had Like and Dislike keys on the RHS!

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#259

Post by edoloughlin »

branchless wrote: post #87
lottin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess bloated means compared to 'instant startup'. Vi starts always instantaneously, whereas Emacs can have a noticeable delay, even if it's only a fraction of a second. Hence the perception that is bloated. Of course compared to the others you mention is quite fast.

I would instantly disregard anyone who says this. Just run it in daemon mode and connect with emacsclient.

I used to do that. Then I got a new job that requires Windows 7 and emacs can't start in daemon mode. :(

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#260

Post by rekado »

yoanizer wrote: post #237

Do you really think choosing between vim, emacs, textmate, sublime, etc is going to make such a big difference in the end result?

To me the answer is "Yes".

What is the "end result"? Is it just a text file containing characters in the desired order? Is the journey at all important or is all that matters reaching the goal?

I have a feeling that most people commenting here have not actually read my blog post; or maybe I failed to get my point across. Comparing Emacs with other text editors is a different topic. I hardly even mention text editing in the blog post.

Using Emacs for text editing is what I do because I'm already using Emacs for everything else (or was it the other way around?). It makes a difference for me because I can use the same malleable system for everything that can be mapped to some text representation. Emacs modes enhance that text representation, make it alive (e.g. hyperlinking in man pages, shells in Emacs, REPL interactions, M-x compile, etc).

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