Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads • Hacker News Board

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#41

Post by AlexCoventry » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32

rusk wrote: 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…

If you're using a ceremonious language like Java, the automation in a modern editor could be useful. I think that's what Gosling was getting at.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#42

Post by jhall1468 » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Both Atom and VSCode are multiplatform and can run on any platform emacs can. Hell there's a version of it that runs in-browser. Both have commercial backing and the platform is built ok Chrome. Hard to imagine a world where any of that adds up to ephemeral.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#43

Post by hprotagonist » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #28

pilif wrote: post #25

Seeing generators and threads being mentioned in the release announcement of a text editor feels a bit... strange. Then again, Emacs is closer to a LISP toolkit for building text editors than it is a text editor, so I guess it's not so strange after all.

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

and tetris. and a psychoanalyst. and ...

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#44

Post by rusk » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Same. I used to swear by Intellij but they just kept on changing things, and even breaking things on me the odd time.

This latest emacs upgrade has been seamless and hasn't required any cognitive overhead to transition.

That said, I'll always be back to IntelliJ for heavy edits. There's nothing better for Java.

I find for less structured languages the less-structured approach engendered by emacs is an advantage.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#45

Post by zeveb » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32

rusk wrote: 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…

> 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.

Emacs is extensible in Lisp; VS Code & Atom are extensible in JavaScript. The point goes to emacs.

Emacs has Magit, Org Mode, AucTeX, notmuch, gnus, ERC, emms, TRAMP, calc, calendar, Diary Mode — what do VS Code & Atom have? The point goes to emacs.

Emacs runs in a GUI. Emacs runs in a terminal. Emacs runs on a machine halfway across the world on the other side of an SSH session. The point goes to emacs.

Emacs is far from perfect, but it's far ahead of its competition.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#46

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

todd8 wrote: post #11

cies wrote: 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…

Vim also has an undo tree, but still manages to retain a sane user experience.

Not that Vim is any paragon of UX design. The point is that you can have a powerful undo system without breaking user expectations.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#47

Post by anamoulous » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32

rusk wrote: 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…

vscode can only be customized by an extension. There's a bunch of one off plugins you have to install to get little bits of functionality that you can get by pasting 15 lines of elisp from the emacs wiki. If no one has built that extension yet, you have to learn to build one yourself. You could always create private "personal" extension and keep it local, but that workflow is tedious.

I'm not saying vscode is less extensible or customizable though, I'm saying there's a barrier to ad-hoc personalization that's will keep it from ever being more easily customized (unless you and I have different definitions of what is "easily customized").

Script Commands[1] is an interesting plugin that attempts to address this shortcoming, but I'd like to see something official at some point.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mklouber...

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#48

Post by VikingCoder » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

I love the Emacs OS, but I'm just not thrilled with the editor that comes default with it. Has anyone ported Visual Studio Code to run on Emacs OS yet?

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#49

Post by wyuenho » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:57 PM UTC

rusk wrote: 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…

What does Ctrl+U-Space do if you don't mind me asking? Is that some magic that you've bound? Mind sharing?

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#50

Post by oblio » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:58 PM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

For some perspective:

BBEdit - launched in 1992 (26 years ago), still around.

Notepad++ - launched in 2003 (15 years ago), still around.

Textmate - launched in 2004 (14 years ago), still around.

Sublime - launched in 2008 (10 years ago), still around.

Almost all the mainstream editors since 1995 at least are around. They have been marginalized, but they're generally around. Especially cross platform editors and even more so Open Source ones have great survival characteristics.

That's why both Atom and VS Code seem like solid long term bets.