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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#261

Post by rekado »

qnaal wrote: post #54
rakel_rakel wrote: post #44

The boilerplate argument against emacs is getting kinda old, isn't it? I used vim exclusively for ~5 years up until last summer when I switched to emacs which I use in more or less the same way, edit something, ctrl-z out to the shell, fix something, fg back to emacs etc... I find the ~2 second startup time for the times when I don't run it as a daemon negligible, and imho it's easily worth it at least if you make us…

> Also the lacking a decent text-editor joke is just that, a joke well, noone's saying that viper-mode couldn't be improved

Or `evil-mode`. (I prefer `god-mode` as I have Emacs keybindings in muscle memory and the vim bindings slowly fade from memory.)

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#263

Post by rekado »

soraminazuki wrote: post #160

Why should people use emacs to run applications when the shell already does that just fine? Just use the shell and you can run applications in any language you want rather than having to stick with elisp. If you want to constantly switch between applications, you can use tmux or simply your terminal emulator's tabbing functionality. You can even switch between GUI applications instaneously if you use a tiling window…

Emacs is my shell. You don't have to stick to elisp either, you just need a little elisp glue. (The Emacs interface for the GNU Guix package manager, for example, is written in Guile Scheme for the most part.)

Emacs is trivially extensible and whatever I make it do can be used in other sub-applications. I can evaluate code wherever I want and change the system at runtime. It's quite a different feel compared to having "unglued", ununified applications.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#264

Post by aldanor »

edoloughlin wrote: post #258
unimpressive wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

The LIKE key... priceless :)

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#265

Post by unsignedint »

cle wrote: post #82
dominotw wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If only someone made something that could monitor daemons and make sure they stay running...

If your system is using systemd, you can create a service file that does that under --user. I manage some user daemons that way.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#266

Post by rekado »

ksk wrote: post #76

I find it interesting that we as programmers love to base a lot of our technical decisions on hard data, but somehow the choice of editors seems immune to this. Has anyone ever done an analysis of the actual objective benefits of these editors? I got suckered into the 'religion' of vi and have spent countless hours learning it to a fairly high level of proficiency over the years. I don't think I've ever recovered all…

> Most of my time is spent outside of the editor - reading specs/docs/code, debugging/tracing/analyzing existing code, or just thinking about code.

Most of my time is spent inside the "editor" (Emacs). Reading docs is in Emacs, debugging is in Emacs, too. Thinking about code is assisted by `M-x zone`... :)

To be able to stay in the same application in which I can use my home-grown features on everything that can be mapped to text buffers is an advantage; a subjective advantage, maybe. I don't need to switch contexts as often any more, and my brain thanks me for that.

I grew up on vim and got very comfortable with it, but elisp, interacting with inferior processes, and the overflowing kitchen sink in general slowly replaced my combination of vim+xmonad+tmux+terminal.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#267

Post by dingo_bat »

sien wrote: post #48
alayne wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime Text is proprietary closed source. That seems counter to modern Unix/Linux goals.

There is Atom these days which is OS and similar to ST. Mind you, Atom takes longer to start than Visual Studio.

VS Code is open source and starts as fast as notepad.exe. Also, I think it has more features than atom.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#268

Post by to3m »

jarcane wrote: post #262
tempodox wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ironically, the only thing Emacs can't seem to do these days is be a browser. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs/W3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eww_%28web_browser%29

I don't believe there is any Javascript support, though, so you'll be out of luck for many modern pages...

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#269

Post by makecheck »

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…

...and it's an unstable and/or insecure way to develop an application, which is why Mac OS X has things like XPCServices and browsers tend to run multi-process tabs.

Just because a program has the illusion of being monolithic doesn't mean that it should shed the lessons of combining smaller, more stable parts.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#270

Post by gkya »

tempodox wrote: post #255
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".

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).

Your comment has a big flaw: it assumes that the grandparent comment is comparing emacs and unix, whereas lisp and unix were compared. If your reading skills are like this, anything is complex for you. And afaik emacs is not a sexual being. And if you think that unix is simple, easy and consistent, your unix fu is probably just adding a fancy prompt to your bashrc. Try ls: how do you sort dirs before files? The first thing you ask is whether it is gnu ls or sth else. Try man, the first question is which format. Make? Same story. I want to get notified for changes in a directory: each unix has its own incompatible thing. And these are the very basics.
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