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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#271

Post by criddell »

gcommer wrote: post #195
criddell wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really use one editor for everything? When I'm working on Python code, I'm in PyCharm. My C++ work on Windows is in Visual Studio. When I ssh into the Linux machine that serves our in-house documentation to make changes, I'm using vim. On OSX, I use BBEDit most of the time. When I'm writing a letter, I'm usually in Word or Google Docs. I think if I spent all day every day in one environment, I would get bored.

> Do you really use one editor for everything? Yes, at least whenever possible. > I think if I spent all day every day in one environment, I would get bored. The opposite perspective: It's extremely frustrating constantly switching between significantly different environments with different UIs, different hotkeys, subtly different jargon, etc.

> It's extremely frustrating constantly switching

Maybe that's the difference. I'm not a productive multitasker. When I have some Python to work on, that's all I'm doing for the next day or two. I'm not jumping from Word to PyCharm to Vim all day.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#272

Post by lispm »

infodroid wrote: post #251
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…

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 window…

Plan9 is not that successful and not a good representation of actual Unix use. Doesn't GNU Emacs run on Plan 9? Wait, there is Acme.

What about Acme's architecture?

> Acme is about 8,000 lines of code in Alef, a concurrent object-oriented language syntactically similar to C [Alef]. Acme’s structure is a set of communicating processes in a single address space. One subset of the processes drives the display and user interface, maintaining the windows; other processes forward mouse and keyboard activity and implement the file server interface for external programs. The language and design worked out well; as explained elsewhere [Pike89, Gans93, Reppy93], user interfaces built with concurrent systems can avoid the clumsy top-level event loop typical of traditional interactive systems.

That does not sound like Unix philosophy. Communicating processes in a single address space application. On Plan 9. Written by Rob Pike at Bell Labs.

We've seen companies like SUN, IBM, HP, DEC/Compaq/whatever they are called now/..., etc. earning zillions on big fat applications. Big fat GUI applications and big fat server applications.

From any Oracle DB, to any Java application, to basically every desktop application - none follows the so-called 'UNIX philosophy'. Thus tools like GNU Emacs have zillions of similar applications under UNIX and GNU Emacs is nothing special at all.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#273

Post by wglb »

gkya wrote: post #80
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.

Running emacs like "$ emacs " is like booting a computer, editing a single text file, and then "$ shutdown -h now".

It isn't actually as bad as all that. I confess that I do this in system admin mode. On my big workstation it takes about five seconds for emacs -nw to start up. And lately, I have begun using 'mg' for such quick tasks Startup time is less than a second. It is probably on the order of VI for size and speed, and uses the emacs keybindings. It is an upgrade of the MicroEMACS editor.

But normally I do open emacs on a per-project basis and keep it open, likely for days. Those do take a little while to start up. And with .emacs.desktop, it is easy to end up with an accumulation of a couple hundred files at startup time.

(Compare the size of a single tab of Chrome to emacs, or even Microsoft Word. Both are swamped by the chrome size. And we think nothing of spinning up a new tab, no problem.)

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#274

Post by ksk »

rekado wrote: post #266
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 m…

Ah, well I guess you're the lucky one :)

For me, most of the material that I need to reference is PDFs/Slides from talks/Books/Web pages/My own hand written notes/etc - basically stuff that is not plain-text. Luckily I have a multi-monitor setup, so I don't really pay any penalty to switch contexts.

But keeping all that aside. As far as just the editing is concerned, all the advanced features in vi and such do help if you're typing out reams of code - something which I never find my self doing.

I suppose the obvious unstated thing here is that people have been productive in all sorts of environments, from notepad to pico to visualstudio to vi. From personal experience I find my self agreeing a lot more with people who say it doesn't matter _that_ much.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#275

Post by clocksld »

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. ;)

The xwidget_mvp branch has been merged into the emacs master branch about a month ago.

It allows you to embed GTK widgets INSIDE an emacs buffer, effectively allowing one to create actual GUIs inside of emacs.

This also allows you to embed a full webkit-based browser (with javascript support!) right into emacs, and use it like a regular browser.

Just clone the emacs repo, build it with gtk3 and xwidget support, and run 'M-x xwidget-webkit-browse-url' to get a full-fledged browser with proper rendering right inside emacs.

https://www.emacswiki.org/pics/static/EmacsXembedScreenshot....

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#276

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?

#277

Post by rodelrod »

jjnoakes wrote: post #257
rodelrod wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were actually interested in the answer. I won't get into an emacs/vim war, thank you, I got tired of it circa 1999.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#278

Post by snaky »

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

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

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#279

Post by snaky »

e40 wrote: post #168

What I think is funny is people making fun of me for reading email in Emacs. I use my own filtering system built on top of MH-E, which is layered on top of nmh command line tools. MH-E uses GNUS for MIME handling and I'm able to view HTML messages just fine. Why I think it's funny: people laugh that I'm using 20-30 year old technology and new tech would serve me better. To each of them I say: I challenge you to an ef…

People often tend to confuse the newer with the better.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#280

Post by rekado »

sooheon wrote: post #170
MarcScott wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While on the other hand, I use it because I can open a shell from within Emacs. I can also use tramp to ssh onto another machine from within emacs, and so don't have to bother installing my favourite editor on headless servers and Raspberry Pis.

Is there a true terminal inside emacs that I don't know about, because all the ones I've tried were buggy chimeras of odd behaviours.

I'm quite content with shell-mode for most of the things I do (took me a while to get used to some of its quirks, but now I like them). For curses applications (like alsamixer) I use ansi-term.
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