Watching Jonathan Blow flying around Emacs on his Twitch streams is always very impressive.
Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
61–70 of 262 posts
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#62I tried Emacs several time. The concept is cool but the execution makes it so that for me, in practice, VS Code is better. I'd want either: * tabs with a good UX or * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. I'd also want a terminal at least as good as the VS Code one, on Windows, to use with Cygwin. With Emacs I'd have to learn a big bunch of terminology no other ed…
There are very few respects in which Emacs is less functional than other editors (good integration with semantically aware refactoring tools is the primary one, imo), and it has excellent support for the only functionality you explicitly mention (command and fuzzy file search).
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#63I tried Emacs several time. The concept is cool but the execution makes it so that for me, in practice, VS Code is better. I'd want either: * tabs with a good UX or * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. I'd also want a terminal at least as good as the VS Code one, on Windows, to use with Cygwin. With Emacs I'd have to learn a big bunch of terminology no other ed…
There are very few respects in which Emacs is less functional than other editors (good integration with semantically aware refactoring tools is the primary one, imo), and it has excellent support for the only functionality you explicitly mention (command and fuzzy file search).
I guessed you missed that part of my comment where I mention tabs and good terminal support on Windows...
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#64There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs. Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of lev…
Exact same thing works in vi/vim. I often use ctrl-o to do the same thing (jump back to previous cursor position).
The fact that Ctrl-O and Ctrl-I exist is just a tiny example of why the modern editors just can't compete with vim and the plethora tiny productivity features it has.
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#65I tried Emacs several time. The concept is cool but the execution makes it so that for me, in practice, VS Code is better. I'd want either: * tabs with a good UX or * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. I'd also want a terminal at least as good as the VS Code one, on Windows, to use with Cygwin. With Emacs I'd have to learn a big bunch of terminology no other ed…
You can consider these points:
- Tabs are not present in Emacs, but C-x C-b will list all open buffers
+ Fuzzy file search : you can take a look at the popular Ido-mode
+ eshell is pretty powerful, if you think about it, you have all the emacs search functionality etc. available in a shell inside the editor itself.
I am not trying to popularise emacs, but "inflexible" is not something that you associate with emacs. If anything, it is the bewildering array of choices that is one drawback. Plus, you should really try:
+ org mode : what is the standout feature now a days. You can even do literate programming in the org mode, so can be viewed as an alternative to Jupyter, for example.
The real gripe for me about emacs is that it is single threaded. So a long grep launched off will freeze the entire editor.
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#66There is a strange editing mode that I stumbled on by myself, which I can do in Emacs. Suppose I am editing a huge file, and need to make change in some other part without necessarily forgetting where I am. I just open a new buffer for the same file, edit the desired area, and close the new buffer. I have the old position restored automatically in the old buffer. Of course, this can be done to arbitrary number of lev…
Every programmer's editor and IDE I've used in the past 22 years has had this feature, all the way back to Delphi in 1996. I don't think Turbo Pascal's text UI had the feature but wouldn't be surprised if it did.
Support varies in whether e.g. lines introduced above the view cause scrolling, or if the views are sticky to relative position, but the basics of multiple editing cursors in multiple views for a single buffer have been pretty pervasive.
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#67I tried Emacs several time. The concept is cool but the execution makes it so that for me, in practice, VS Code is better. I'd want either: * tabs with a good UX or * super powerful, easy to use, integrated command and fuzzy file search, also with a good UX. I'd also want a terminal at least as good as the VS Code one, on Windows, to use with Cygwin. With Emacs I'd have to learn a big bunch of terminology no other ed…
You can consider these points: - Tabs are not present in Emacs, but C-x C-b will list all open buffers + Fuzzy file search : you can take a look at the popular Ido-mode + eshell is pretty powerful, if you think about it, you have all the emacs search functionality etc. available in a shell inside the editor itself. I am not trying to popularise emacs, but "inflexible" is not something that you associate with emacs. I…
> - Tabs are not present in Emacs, but C-x C-b will list all open buffers
I want a passive, not an active interface. I want to be able to visually scan the tabs. I want to be able to click them when I'm not in the mood for keyboarding. I want the tabs and the tab bar to not be ugly as sin :) Etc, etc. Heck, if Vim has them built-in (and Vim also has the same concept of buffers as Emacs), surely Emacs could (should?) have them.
> Fuzzy file search : you can take a look at the popular Ido-mode
I know there's modes for that, but open up a folder in VS Code. It's seamless, I don't need to configure it, it just works, they bundle ripgrep for me, etc. The UI/UX are also slick.
> The real gripe for me about emacs is that it is single threaded. So a long grep launched off will freeze the entire editor.
Yeah, Vim is kind of like that, even though it's recently gotten async.
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#68I gave emacs another try earlier this year. First vanilla, but then I missed vim keybindings so I installed evil. Then I switched to spacemacs. Eventually I decided I was barely using any emacs-specific features and just went back to vim. Vim feels so much snappier. I do miss some of the more ide features (jump to definition, execute selected code) but it wasn't worth the overhead, imho.
If there's one thing I will always be grateful to emacs for; it will be changing Caps Lock -> Ctrl Life changing.
I completely agree, but I have the os do that. Except on my iPad where I am grateful for blink to have that capability.
On windows I had a special mode for caps lock via autohotkeys. Press and release meant esc. Press followed by another key and release was ctrl-key. I really liked that, but I couldn’t do it on Mac or iPad so I just settled on ctrl.
My old //e has control there naturally.
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an Emacs user I'm mostly "afraid" of VSCode getting so popular that people will make cool tools targeting VSCode only. Like, it'll become the Chrome of text editors.
Emacs hasn't been really mainstream in quite a while and it's still actively maintained and improved upon. I'm not too worried. A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going. What's VSCode's market share anyway? Is it really that big? I've never used it personally and I had no idea it was so popular.
> A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going.
The trends of the last few years are worrisome, though, particularly as regards the pool of developers who can work on Emacs core (the part written in C). Right now there's only one dev who's in a position to do non-trivial work on the display engine, and he also took on primary maintainer responsibilities a couple of years ago. When he burns out, the project is going to stall, hard.
Stefan Monnier, who was maintainer for most of the past decade, perceived this trend very clearly and was vocal in trying to recruit new talent. He didn't get much cooperation from other core devs.
Re: Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)
#70I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs. For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete with hyper-links, tables, foot notes and the option to export the results as LaTeX, HTML, Open-Office, and so on with just a few keypresses. It's not just an editor, or an IDE, or even a windowing system - it is a cross-platform computing environment that can b…
Emacs is an OS that lacks a decent text editor (the joke is as old as Emacs).
I realize this is a joke, but there seem to be a lot of people who are really attached to the interpretation of Emacs as a little Lisp Machine.