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Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

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Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#111

Post by varjag »

kamaal wrote: post #75
AlexCoventry wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java by many definitions is a bit like assembly language of our current times. You will end up stitching highly verbose pieces of code. Which is why Java IDEs have specific features to emit get/set functions etc. Plus you will have to access a method hiding 5 class layers below. You will need IDEs designed to do this sort of work really well. Emacs and Vi have been designed to largely play with Text, plus I think wit…

Wouldn't call assembly programming "highly verbose". If anything it's opposite - very little boilerplate, if at all.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#112

Post by fredsanford »

oblio wrote: post #89
mr_overalls wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The post above yours is simply an illustration of survivorship bias.

I'd be interested to hear about former mainstream editors from that time that are gone. Especially cross platform and Open Source ones :)

Brief, Multiedit, Codewright, Semware, Slickedit and Epsilon used to keep the lights on at many programming/tech magazines. You don't hear much about them anymore...

Clark Maurer still updates Slickedit at least annually though.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#113

Post by didibus »

kiaulen wrote: post #71
anamoulous wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

I'd argue this is a feature more than a bug. I haven't done much with VSC, but I have done a lot with both atom and emacs (via spacemacs). How do you find out even the name of what you are looking for to find it on the wiki? Is that snippet of elisp tested (or even testable?) What does it do exactly? Is it a passive effect, or something you have to execute a command to run? In atom, you can find packages on the websi…

I've found it way easier to customize Emacs, and you can do so much more. Though Atom has pretty great customizability also. This is not true of Visual Studio Code, which has much stricter plugin points.

That said, I know Lisp as well as JavaScript. Obviously, more people know JS, so might find tweaking Atom easier.

In emacs though, I don't even need the internet to figure out how to customize things. C-h is all you need. There's a book bundled in, all functions and variables have amazing built in documentation. You can search for any binding, function or var by regex, go to their code, read their doc, redefine them at runtime.

The only place where Atom wins for me is in theming.

At the end of the day though, I had to go back to Emacs for performance and memory footprint reasons. Atom was just too slow, and used up too much memory.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#114

Post by TeMPOraL »

_0w8t wrote: post #102
gkya wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is in no race with text editors. If Emacs was a pack of a dozen of eggs, text editing would be that one egg on the corner with the fragile shell. Mr. Java can beg all he wants, but one thing people don't get is that Emacs is not a text editor. It has one, yes, but it's a program where the user can interactively manipulate data presented in buffers via Lisp, and keys bound to some Lisp. Thus, it is in a league o…

Emacs is not optimized for customizations. It allows to customize everything, but the efforts required often becomes a programming project on its own. 20 years ago I spent eventually months to make the buffers switch the way I liked. Yes, i made it work precisely the way I wanted, but I suspect it would be easier to implement that feature in a native code as a patch for an editor where a configuration is just an ini…

In any other program, such customization you made would be impossible.

The things you can customize in other editors and IDEs, you can customize through the M-x customize interface. The things you'd install as plugins, you can get from Emacs package manager. All other things that you can - with smaller or greater amount of work - alter in elisp, are more-less impossible in other editors.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#115

Post by kqr »

_0w8t wrote: post #102
gkya wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is in no race with text editors. If Emacs was a pack of a dozen of eggs, text editing would be that one egg on the corner with the fragile shell. Mr. Java can beg all he wants, but one thing people don't get is that Emacs is not a text editor. It has one, yes, but it's a program where the user can interactively manipulate data presented in buffers via Lisp, and keys bound to some Lisp. Thus, it is in a league o…

Emacs is not optimized for customizations. It allows to customize everything, but the efforts required often becomes a programming project on its own. 20 years ago I spent eventually months to make the buffers switch the way I liked. Yes, i made it work precisely the way I wanted, but I suspect it would be easier to implement that feature in a native code as a patch for an editor where a configuration is just an ini…

Why would writing a patch for any other editor be easier (or less hard) than writing a patch for Emacs?

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

_0w8t wrote: post #110
BooneJS wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is compared to vim because both can be run in a terminal on a remote machine, not because it’s the JS-editor-of-the-month. There’s a fairly decent chance I’d switch away from vim if I ever had a job where I could edit code locally.

Once I had to work remotely over 2g cell phone. Using remote terminal was too painful due to huge latencies approaching 1s. What worked surprisingly well was to work on a local copy of files in a local editor and then to run command remotely I would prefix them with a script that I aliased like rc. The script rsyncs first the tree to the remote host and then run the command there. These days for much simpler setup I…

For that use case, if you have Emacs locally, you could use TRAMP - which basically works the way your script does. It allows you to transparently access files, directory structures, or even run shells on remote machines. It supports many protocols; the typical way it works, is it starts an ssh connection in the background, and uses the shell to ferry the file you want to edit to your local machine, and then transparently ship it back when you save.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#117

Post by Diobo1000 »

In all honesty, the main selling point of Emacs for me isn't just how configurable it is but also how performant it is in different environments. Since VSCode uses Electron editing feels sluggish, high ram and cpu usage is expected, and there's a noticable latency between keypresses. While these may seem like trivial issues, they actually negatively impact my typing experience to a high degree.

I'm currently using the Doom-Emacs distribution for Emacs and everything is working very well. I can use vim keybindings in addition to many other customizations and improvements with very little time invested in actually writing elisp. This is mostly because the developer of the distribution is passionate and optimizes his configuration for modern languages so there is very little needed to change.

If VSCode or any other text editor managed to provide a fast yet highly configurable editing experience without draining my laptop battery instantly, I would immediately switch. So far, none have been able to meet this specification even though I have tried almost all of the common text editors.

I'm hoping a project like the Xi text editor might one day actualize my desire.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#118

Post by kqr »

krylon wrote: post #95
BooneJS wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is compared to vim because both can be run in a terminal on a remote machine, not because it’s the JS-editor-of-the-month. There’s a fairly decent chance I’d switch away from vim if I ever had a job where I could edit code locally.

Emacs has TRAMP, which allows transparent access to files on remote systems using a variety of protocols (but mostly ssh/sftp).

...and if you haven't given TRAMP an honest shot, you definitely should. I took the leap not too long ago, and it is absolutely amazing. Whenever I can't access a host using TRAMP (does happen, but very rarely), I put off whatever task I have to do on that host for a very long time.

The fact that TRAMP lets you open files on remote systems in and of itself is fairly mundane. What makes it really cool is that it works seamlessly also with dual-pane dired, and just about anything you do in Emacs. It turns remote filesystems into local ones.

Being able to, in my regular file manager (I like Sunrise Commander), treat any combination of remote and local filesystems as though they were local, is a huge productivity boost.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#119

Post by kqr »

kazinator wrote: post #103
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…

So those GNU Emacs screenshots with embedded graphics are fakes? Like: https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/screenshots.html

Not fake. My report authoring process includes a live updating PDF preview in an Emacs sidebar.

However, this graphics stuff is still bolted onto a core engine that treats everything as a text terminal.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#120

Post by kwoff »

samatman wrote: post #93

Does anyone happen to know why e-lisp iterators stop on a magic `iter-end-of-sequence` instead of on `nil`? That doesn't seem Lispy.

In addition to the sentinel/in-band replies, they also put properties on that symbol: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/81b5131e11fa96d32... ( https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Sy... )
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