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Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

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Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#31
post #3
post #2

Weird place to vent. But I find it so interesting that Emacs in all it's wisdom does not have (to me) acceptable undo behavior. Sometimes when I want to undo a bit, it undoes so much that I have to do a few seconds of copy-pasting.

You should try undo tree ( http://www.dr-qubit.org/undo-tree.html ), it's a must have extension which brings proper undo-redo and a tree visualisation of history with diffs and many other options.

Trying it out for the first time. Love this line in the docs:

"The only downside to this more advanced yet simpler undo system is that it was inspired by Vim."

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#32
post #21

Here's what grinds my gears: That the cursor follows the visible buffer. It would be nice to be able to scroll to another part of a file and then just start typing and be back where I was ... I mean I could understand if this was an efficiency thing to do with scaling to large files due to a kind of a tiling memory model or something, but emacs doesn't even do that! It's not a huge deal I've learned to get used to us…

The cursor stays in the viewport because, deep down, Emacs still thinks that it's outputting to a 1970s-era ASCII terminal.

See this https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...

“Internally, Emacs still belives it’s a text program, and we pretend Xt is a text terminal, and we pretend GTK is an Xt toolkit. It’s a fractal of delusion.”

For years, James Gosling, author of the first version of Emacs that ran on Unix (the ancestor of GNU Emacs), has been begging people to stop using Emacs.

Emacs is in a race, not against Vim, but against VS Code and Atom for which editor can be more easily customized. In the long run, it doesn't look good for Emacs.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#33
post #2

Weird place to vent. But I find it so interesting that Emacs in all it's wisdom does not have (to me) acceptable undo behavior. Sometimes when I want to undo a bit, it undoes so much that I have to do a few seconds of copy-pasting.

Emacs provides comprehensive building blocks for any kind of undo/redo system you could want, while providing it's very basic example implementation of undo/redo. Many other packages exist that focus on different ways to do this.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#34
post #21

Here's what grinds my gears: That the cursor follows the visible buffer. It would be nice to be able to scroll to another part of a file and then just start typing and be back where I was ... I mean I could understand if this was an efficiency thing to do with scaling to large files due to a kind of a tiling memory model or something, but emacs doesn't even do that! It's not a huge deal I've learned to get used to us…

The cursor stays in the viewport because, deep down, Emacs still thinks that it's outputting to a 1970s-era ASCII terminal. See this https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo... “Internally, Emacs still belives it’s a text program, and we pretend Xt is a text terminal, and we pretend GTK is an Xt toolkit. It’s a fractal of delusion.” For years, James Gosling, author of the first version of Emacs th…

For me as a daily Emacs user this sounds like another "editor war" rant. I neither find Emacs hard to customize nor do I think it has any substantial limitations other than the ones that are based on my own lack of knowledge. It's always fair to compare it to Vim, but I don't think it makes much sense to compare it in general to VS Code or Atom.

One major reason for me to use Emacs and not newer software is that it is not only cross-platform but also gives some confidence that I will be able to use it in twenty years from now on a new platform. The same could be said about Vim. In comparison to these two, newer editors sometimes appear too ephemeral and fragile to me. (Then again, I used to use BBedit on the Mac and just found out that it's still around! What a nice surprise!)

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#35
post #21

Here's what grinds my gears: That the cursor follows the visible buffer. It would be nice to be able to scroll to another part of a file and then just start typing and be back where I was ... I mean I could understand if this was an efficiency thing to do with scaling to large files due to a kind of a tiling memory model or something, but emacs doesn't even do that! It's not a huge deal I've learned to get used to us…

The cursor stays in the viewport because, deep down, Emacs still thinks that it's outputting to a 1970s-era ASCII terminal. See this https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo... “Internally, Emacs still belives it’s a text program, and we pretend Xt is a text terminal, and we pretend GTK is an Xt toolkit. It’s a fractal of delusion.” For years, James Gosling, author of the first version of Emacs th…

I have to admit that I mostly use IntelliJ and related products or VSCode these days, but I can't give up the emacs key bindings.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#36
I think this bit is a piece of wisdom:

"I’m a firm believer that we should understand how things work underneath the hood so that we can make the most effective use of at them. No program should rely on the particulars of the iterator object internals for correctness, but a well-written program should employ them in a way that best exploits their expected implementation."

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#37
post #11
post #2

Weird place to vent. But I find it so interesting that Emacs in all it's wisdom does not have (to me) acceptable undo behavior. Sometimes when I want to undo a bit, it undoes so much that I have to do a few seconds of copy-pasting.

The undo system is confusing if you are accustomed to undo/redo in practically every other piece of software, but it does make sense (in its own kind of way). See the documentation for the undo commmand[1]. Emacs undo is powerful albeit with more cognitive load to use. I have occasionally had to take over the controls for new emacs users while pair programming because the undo, while logical and consistent, doesn’t w…

Anyone that wants to use emacs seriously has to learn a about the kill ring. Something like Helm kill ring is great. It lets you go way back in time and re-pasted killed things.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#38
post #2

Weird place to vent. But I find it so interesting that Emacs in all it's wisdom does not have (to me) acceptable undo behavior. Sometimes when I want to undo a bit, it undoes so much that I have to do a few seconds of copy-pasting.

[deleted]

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#39
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is an OS written in Lisp, with a text editor as sample application. :)

Also if you require good keybindings in the sample application, there's always viper :)

Evil mode is far far better than viper. Do yourself a favor and switch today.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#40
post #2

Weird place to vent. But I find it so interesting that Emacs in all it's wisdom does not have (to me) acceptable undo behavior. Sometimes when I want to undo a bit, it undoes so much that I have to do a few seconds of copy-pasting.

If you really want to bake your noodle, try undo-tree-mode some time.
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