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Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

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21–30 of 78 posts

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#21

I use emacs and vim quite rarely, only when I see potential benefit of it. Both have some amazing features but also seems to be locked in stone age on IT. In my opinion this is most deterring for new user - not "steep learning curve". I wonder why they refuse to open their eyes to current (or at least 2000's) state of technology. They cling to ancient foundation of their programs as something unmovable and unchangeab…

I don't care about reality. I don't use Emacs today, (I use nvi), but I had a lot of respect of what could I do with few MB of RAM compared to monstrosities today such as Atom, Slack and Sublime Text.

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#22

I use emacs and vim quite rarely, only when I see potential benefit of it. Both have some amazing features but also seems to be locked in stone age on IT. In my opinion this is most deterring for new user - not "steep learning curve". I wonder why they refuse to open their eyes to current (or at least 2000's) state of technology. They cling to ancient foundation of their programs as something unmovable and unchangeab…

Funny enough Emacspeak for the blind totally owns any new GUI technology. They can do everything from inside: IM, web, news, coding, playing music, reading ebooks, MUD's, check the mainstream news...

https://tvraman.github.io/emacspeak/applications.html

Your reality and bullshit applications such as Electron based bloatwares are a bad joke against disabled people.

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#23

I use emacs and vim quite rarely, only when I see potential benefit of it. Both have some amazing features but also seems to be locked in stone age on IT. In my opinion this is most deterring for new user - not "steep learning curve". I wonder why they refuse to open their eyes to current (or at least 2000's) state of technology. They cling to ancient foundation of their programs as something unmovable and unchangeab…

[deleted]

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#24
IMO any "old enough" and complex enough software suffer some kind of "age&complexity" problems... No matter how you design it, unix choose simplicity and we see that today no real unix exists anymore (yes, they do exists per name, but in fact they do not follow unix principles), ITS, Emacs, LispM, Alto, ... choose integration and completeness and except Emacs they are essentially dead... Modern software try to choose modularity and if you find a modern complex enough software you know well how messy pachyderm is...

Personally I choose (recently) Emacs as my main computing environment because even with it's many problems (there are and recent evolution solve some and add others) it's the most effective computing environment I have ever found.

So in conclusion I dream a "modern Emacs" with an EXWM that play nice with any kind of GUIs (it gets a bit worse recently for floating windows or floating windows apps change for the worse I do not know exactly), I dream a damn coherent and complete MUA instead of my actual super-spaghetti-code mess mix of mbsync+notmuch+afew+homegrown crappy scripts + ... just to have a damn good modern and efficient email solution NO ONE, web(cr)app(y) UIs included seems to provide... I dream a GuixSD in org-mode in my own personal config so I have an "my_desktop.org" that contain anything from OS to Emacs config and I can export, change, replicate it in a snap... But that's a bit of a dream for now. New nice stuff arrive (doom modeline is really nice, for instance) but change the entire ecosystem, perhaps re-writing it in Guile Scheme... Well It's unlike to happen more than a timid POC by few smart guys...

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#25
post #2

I was planning on taking on porting Emacs to the iPad, given that it's a fantastically fast, light and low-power modern portable computer. But reading this gave me pause, I'm not sure I can dedicate as much time to this as it seems will be necessary...

> I was planning on taking on porting Emacs to the iPad

I thought that was impossible anyway, given Apple's prohibitions on both GPL code and software runtimes in iOS apps? However I suppose Emacs could be sideloaded onto jailbroken iPads.

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#26
post #3

FWIW, I've used Emacs for a long time (i.e. long before this article was published) and don't recall it ever flickering. Not to say it didn't, or that it wasn't a problem for the author, but he's exaggerating a bit when he says it flickered all the time.

Few time I see casual flicker (EXWM, nvidia, NixOS with compton)... Oh nothing really annoying!

I have far more annoying problems with floating windows and casual (newly introduced) bug that "lost" my physical screen size forcing to restart X to recover...

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#27
post #2

I was planning on taking on porting Emacs to the iPad, given that it's a fantastically fast, light and low-power modern portable computer. But reading this gave me pause, I'm not sure I can dedicate as much time to this as it seems will be necessary...

I tried Emacs via various hacks on Android... Mostly to have org-mode there... With a touch only UI it's not usable. With a physical keyboard I see ZERO reason to choose such crappy OS instead of a small ultrabook...

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#28
post #8

Last time this showed up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830206 And for anyone else using Emacs on a Mac: 1. I use the plain vanilla GNU Emacs from here: https://emacsformacosx.com/ . It does flicker from time to time, but it doesn't bother me. 2. Some Mac users seem to prefer this: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS It's supposed to be flicker-free, among other things, but doesn't play well with M…

On Mac I use the emacs-mac port by Mitsuharu Yamamoto: https://bitbucket.org/mituharu/emacs-mac/overview which, in my opinion, works well. It can also be installed via brew (from source) or brew cask: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#29
post #27
post #2

I was planning on taking on porting Emacs to the iPad, given that it's a fantastically fast, light and low-power modern portable computer. But reading this gave me pause, I'm not sure I can dedicate as much time to this as it seems will be necessary...

I tried Emacs via various hacks on Android... Mostly to have org-mode there... With a touch only UI it's not usable. With a physical keyboard I see ZERO reason to choose such crappy OS instead of a small ultrabook...

Check out the Gemini PDA. It's an Android mobile phone with a full keyboard. I have (and can recommend) the first version, but there is a new version in the works right now, the "Cosmo Communicator":

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cosmo-communicator#/

Re: Buttery smooth Emacs (2016)

#30
post #24

IMO any "old enough" and complex enough software suffer some kind of "age&complexity" problems... No matter how you design it, unix choose simplicity and we see that today no real unix exists anymore (yes, they do exists per name, but in fact they do not follow unix principles), ITS, Emacs, LispM, Alto, ... choose integration and completeness and except Emacs they are essentially dead... Modern software try to choose…

I'm trying to parse your first paragraph.

Isn't Unix entirely about modularity?

And I suppose you could argue that emacs is a (os like) substrate that enables modularity on top of it. Theres an old joke, emacs is a nice OS, only lacking a decent text editor.

Or are you referring to the actual code itself?

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