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Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

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Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#151
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To that end I like spacemacs. But it did incur enough of a startup penalty that have have shifted back to vim. I oscillate between them and vscode. I don’t use vim bindings in vscode though.

Run it in daemon mode. startup time is not a thing for emacs.

It's not stable enough for me. Well, my plugins aren't. I need to be able to reset state periodically.

Plus, I like to have separate instances of emacs with different groups of files from separate but related projects. I end up with a zoo of buffers commingled in daemon mode. It just doesn't fit how I work.

I wish it had an image based startup scheme... freeze an image of emacs after init is done.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#152
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.

I use Emacs as my daily driver. Your comment feels very much like from someone who hasn't realized the true powers of Emacs-Lisp. Even if someone doesn't hack in Elisp, once they discover power packages like Org mode or Magit, they will know right away that there's no competition for those out there (vim, Atom, VS Code, etc).

> 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.

Even if that's the case, what's the point he's trying to make? Why? How does that matter to folks who are using Emacs today, and know it first hand that it's the best hackable text buffer engine out there?

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#153
post #134
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emacs API is just insane with too many special cases or with other packages unexpectedly affecting semantics. Even after stepping in debugger I often could not be sure if the things worked like I thought they should work with too much unstructured global state that is randomly poked.

That doesn't quite ring any bell.. Have you used edebug? I haven't seen that level of code introspection and debbugability in any other tool, even a development environment.

Emacs allows you to look into and debug any function or variable, be it internal that shipped with its core, or one that you wrote.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#154
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 am tied to using Emacs because so much of my work is done in SSH sessions on remote servers. I own licenses for all JetBrains IDEs, and find real value in them, but I can’t imagine not using Emacs + configurations for favorite languages + orgmode frequently and every day.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#155
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run it in daemon mode. startup time is not a thing for emacs.

It's not stable enough for me. Well, my plugins aren't. I need to be able to reset state periodically. Plus, I like to have separate instances of emacs with different groups of files from separate but related projects. I end up with a zoo of buffers commingled in daemon mode. It just doesn't fit how I work. I wish it had an image based startup scheme... freeze an image of emacs after init is done.

What if I tell you that you can? :) You can unexec Emacs at its current working state and it will output a new executable. Startup is close to instant!

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#156
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…

A thousand time this. I love Emacs, but the fact that SCROLLING MOVES THE CURSOR drives me crazy.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#157

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?

All jokes aside, is it the ui if vscode that you prefer? I have a hard time nailing it down, but aside from configuration, I do like vscode. I might use it more if we weren’t stuck in an old version of rhel at work.

The dream is to have an Emacs with a modern UI like VSCode

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#158
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think about why one needs a sofisticated customization in an editor. It implies it's defaults reflecting the workflow of the developers are significantly different from yours. To fix this you essentially must become a developer. And since the feature you want is not what the developers want, your has to maintain the feature as long as you use the editor. Now think about all the time one spends on that. If it does not feel like fun or hobby, then one better try to find some other editor that matches what one wants by default or after 5 minutes of poking in the preferences menu.

Re: Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

#159
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think about why one needs a sofisticated customization in an editor. It implies it's defaults reflecting the workflow of the developers are significantly different from yours. To fix this you essentially must become a developer. And since the feature you want is not what the developers want, your has to maintain the feature as long as you use the editor. Now think about all the time one spends on that. If it does not…

Anybody can use any tool to their liking, obviously. But again, you are objectively wrong with Emacs. Every programmer has certain things they need to automate, certain recurrent tasks and then certain non-programming stuff. I am not a professional ptogrammer, and I use Emacs for a handful of non programming tasks. I do tens of things daily with it that is plain impossible with a preferences menu, and impossible or prohibitively hard to do with other programs.

Edit: Now I'm on the computer, I can link you to my init.el [1] so that you can skim and observe how much is configuration and how much is stuff that's possibly unique to my workflow. And how much is very useful stuff only possible in Emacs (one of my favourites is the URL routing stuff, at line 3674, something I inadvertently use tens of times a day).

[1] https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/6a1e400488839b7...

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