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Why GNU Emacs?

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Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#281

Post by rekado »

ksk wrote: post #274
rekado wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I'm not one to argue about productivity. It's a term I never found very meaningful, so I cannot be sure other people mean the same that I understand when I hear the term.

For me it's not about lines of code per unit of time, but about what feels right, and that's very subjective. Dependent on the task I can probably make a decent amount of progress without Emacs, too, so I wouldn't argue that my productivity depends on it. But this Emacs environment is molded after my habits, so it's a really comfortable place, an extension of my body, much like a good tool for wood working that fits your hand just right and lets you work directly on an object without having to think of the tool as a mediator between your body and the work piece.

I wouldn't work with computers if I didn't feel comfortable. Thanks to the flexibility and hackability of Emacs I'm a lot more comfortable doing computer work than I would be without it, meaning that I'll become a gardener a couple of decades later than I would without it.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#282

Post by ksk »

rekado wrote: post #281
ksk wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I'm not one to argue about productivity. It's a term I never found very meaningful, so I cannot be sure other people mean the same that I understand when I hear the term. For me it's not about lines of code per unit of time, but about what feels right, and that's very subjective. Dependent on the task I can probably make a decent amount of progress without Emacs, too, so I wouldn't argue that my productivity depends…

I agree with your view.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#283

Post by __david__ »

flogic wrote: post #198
bch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be confrontational, but conversational -- I'd say that both vi and Emacs have solid fundamentals and have stuck with a model that works, to their credit. I must admit that I shop around for editors occasionally (I'm a long-time emacs person, who swapped back to vi a few years ago to re-develop his vi-fu), but I haven't seen anything so compelling that I've switched to anything else. It may well be that…

My primary issue with Vi and Emacs isn't really about lack. They are quite powerful tools. The primary problem is that they impose a certain amount of mental overhead. Emacs was a bit worse in that regard since many of its key bindings are actually sequences. Sublime Text is rather powerful but in terms of features it's probably the one that is lacking of the 3. The win was in unloading the overhead from my normal wo…

I think that mental overhead is the steep learning curve that everyone talks about. I remember when I first started learning Emacs it was hard. I just had to think in this new way (I was used to cua style keystrokes), but after a month or so my muscle memory developed and I started not having to directly think about what I was doing. Once you get to that point, the overhead is gone and things become very nice.

But I'll grant you it's a hard sell to say "this is great, but you're going to be unproductive for a month". Nonetheless, I think the payout is very much worth it, and if you are interested, make sure you are prepared, and stick with it for a good long time before giving up.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#284

Post by __david__ »

pjmlp wrote: post #210
TeMPOraL wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if those quad-cores and 16GB of RAM would actually be put to good use in the "modern"/"hot" IDE world, we could talk. If anything is starving out innovation, it's sticking to CUA, mouse-driven development and rewriting nano in JavaScript...

When those IDEs are able to achieve what was possible in Xerox PARC workstations, as demoed occasionally by Bret Victor, then we can talk about moving forward. PDP-11 command line experience is not even there.

> PDP-11 command line experience is not even there.

Are you saying the modern unix command line is not as good/better than the "PDP-11 command line experience"?

Also, which PDP-11 command line? RSTS? RT11? Unix? or maybe that awesome front panel where you had to manually input your boot loader in binary every time you started the machine?

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#285

Post by pjmlp »

__david__ wrote: post #284
pjmlp wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When those IDEs are able to achieve what was possible in Xerox PARC workstations, as demoed occasionally by Bret Victor, then we can talk about moving forward. PDP-11 command line experience is not even there.

> PDP-11 command line experience is not even there. Are you saying the modern unix command line is not as good/better than the "PDP-11 command line experience"? Also, which PDP-11 command line? RSTS? RT11? Unix? or maybe that awesome front panel where you had to manually input your boot loader in binary every time you started the machine?

> Are you saying the modern unix command line is not as good/better than the "PDP-11 command line experience"?

No, I am saying that it isn't even close to the Xerox PARC REPL experience from Interlisp-D, Mesa/Cedar and Smalltalk environments.

> Also, which PDP-11 command line? RSTS? RT11? Unix? or maybe that awesome front panel where you had to manually input your boot loader in binary every time you started the machine?

The VT-100 interface some people seem to keep living on.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#286

Post by muraiki »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #97

I've been an emacs user for the last year or so. Previously, I'd used Sublime Text, which I think is a fantastic editor. I loved its speed and especially its simplicity -- pretty much everything just works right out of the box, configuration is managed through JSON instead of some obscure imperative language, etc. But ultimately I really needed two things: the ability to use it over SSH, and the ability to run a term…

I found http://vim-adventures.com/ (no affiliation) to be the best way to finally learn vim in the sense of actually developing automatic muscle memory. It teaches you how to use vim using a 2d game. It's worlds better than the built in vim tutorial, to say the least. :)

For a really different take on editors+shells, check out acme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#287

Post by gkya »

gpderetta wrote: post #252
gkya wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're waiting for a day in the past: See EXWM, links in a sibling comment. With it, you can use emacs as your window manager already.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#288

Post by gkya »

pmoriarty wrote: post #175
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 emacs' terminal emulators have been resoundly awful for me. This was probably my biggest disappointment with emacs. I was so looking forward to having the shell be useable from inside emacs, but it's really not. Now I just use a regular terminal with tmux inside it and emacsclient inside that.

Emacs doesn't really have a terminal emulator, and terminal graphics are mostly unusable in emacs. Shell and ansi-term are there for when you cannot avoid some shell-fu. I use it mostly for VCS operations that cannot be done with VC, and nowadays building Emacs 25 pretests. I use dired instead of ls, proced instead of h?top|ps, but for a sysadmin these are not viable, I understand.

I do not use magit because I do not only use git, and VC allows me to use Git, RCS and CVS easily without learning different emacs interfaces for each.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#289

Post by cema »

tempodox wrote: post #256
mundanevoice wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Well, emacs certainly can be many things, if not all things. But is it? There is a difference.

Re: Why GNU Emacs?

#290

Post by cema »

qznc wrote: post #223
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 Emacs/Lisp gives you a Unix in your Unix.

Rather, it gives you something in many ways similar to Unix and not necessarily in Unix.
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