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Emacs 26.2 Released

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Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is the one environment that I've been a fan of from afar. I recognize the brilliance and power of it, but a few things have always kept me away from using it on the Mac. And I've put in serious attempts, including going emacs-only, then a custom evil mode, then spacemacs - - The server mode compatibility with the way Mac applications are set up. I'd ideally want an emacs server running in the background, and a…

> - Font rendering. Worth double-checking, but I think that's one area Mituharu's is better than standard Emacs. I definitely recall some font rendering issues with some past version. As for your other points, they aren't resolved. FWIW, I work around them: > The server mode compatibility I just have one long-running Emacs session. I have some colleagues who have experimented with using a launchd LaunchAgent to start…

If you haven't seen it before, you might be interested in something like chunkwm[1], a tiling window manager for MacOS. I've been using it for a couple of years now and its been fantastic and works almost exactly like a linux-based tiling wm.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#123
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about evil mode? Also spacemacs has evil bindings for all of its emacs packages.

Vi(m) is not just a set of key bindings. It is also a philosophy of text editing that is much more integrated with the command line. You cannot replicate it entirely in other editors.

I don't know what the state of vi(m) emulation was the last time you used emacs, but evil-mode is very comprehensive. About the only thing I missed when I made the switch was tabs; everything else either just worked as in vim or had a near-identical equivalent. I'm curious what you expect would be missing.

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#124
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> f there is already an selection, the click causes the start or the end of the selection to move to the site of the click, which is behavior I've not seen in any other GUI Emacs does that in X11 because that is (or at least was ) the standard behavior for text selection in X11. Emacs is simply conforming to the environment it is running within.

Emacs's Mac (graphical) interface does that, too, which is not conforming to the environment it is running in. And there is no user option for changing it to a contextual menu containing Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. (I changed it for myself by writing about 100 lines of Emacs Lisp.)

I would guess that’s because IIRC, there’s no official support for Emacs to display native windows in Cocoa, and Emacs is simply using macOS’ X11 compatibility system.

If you could fix that behavior so that Emacs behaves more like a native Cocoa application, I see no reason that the Emacs maintainers should reject a patch. Emacs has, as far as I can tell, always strived to use as much of a native system’s interface and conventions as possible. Emacs is very big, so it might seem to be a self-contained world of its own, but it’s trying not to be too idiosyncratic.

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#125
post #8

I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.

Can you give the n00b's any tips on how to master emacs while keeping it interesting?

The built-in tour (C-h t) is pretty good and doesn't take too long.

Learn the various built-in help features, and use them. C-h C-h describes all the various help features.

Beyond that - force yourself to navigate via the keyboard only (no mouse, no arrow keys). You'll get more efficient and pick up shortcuts as you go.

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#126
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs's Mac (graphical) interface does that, too, which is not conforming to the environment it is running in. And there is no user option for changing it to a contextual menu containing Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. (I changed it for myself by writing about 100 lines of Emacs Lisp.)

I would guess that’s because IIRC, there’s no official support for Emacs to display native windows in Cocoa, and Emacs is simply using macOS’ X11 compatibility system. If you could fix that behavior so that Emacs behaves more like a native Cocoa application, I see no reason that the Emacs maintainers should reject a patch. Emacs has, as far as I can tell, always strived to use as much of a native system’s interface a…

>I would guess that’s because IIRC, there’s no official support for Emacs to display native windows in Cocoa

You would guess wrong.

(If you install an X server, you can run Emacs on X11 on a Mac, but if you do, the text looks radically different from the text in other Mac apps. ADDED. whereas if you run Emacs directly on Cocoa, the way most Emacs users on Mac do it excepting the ones running Emacs inside a terminal environment, the text looks exactly the same as the text in, e.g., Textmate or Terminal.app.)

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#127
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that’s because IIRC, there’s no official support for Emacs to display native windows in Cocoa, and Emacs is simply using macOS’ X11 compatibility system. If you could fix that behavior so that Emacs behaves more like a native Cocoa application, I see no reason that the Emacs maintainers should reject a patch. Emacs has, as far as I can tell, always strived to use as much of a native system’s interface a…

>I would guess that’s because IIRC, there’s no official support for Emacs to display native windows in Cocoa You would guess wrong. (If you install an X server, you can run Emacs on X11 on a Mac, but if you do, the text looks radically different from the text in other Mac apps. ADDED. whereas if you run Emacs directly on Cocoa, the way most Emacs users on Mac do it excepting the ones running Emacs inside a terminal e…

Hmm. I would then assume that Emacs has rudimentary rendering support in Cocoa, but is otherwise treating it as a variant of X11, and not the fully different graphical system it presumably is. Emacs still has no full-fledged Cocoa integration. That is still only available in the Aquamacs fork, as far as I know: http://aquamacs.org/

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#128
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why vscode?

I’ve seen this pop up a lot lately—someone who’s been using Emacs or Vim for years and then sees the “new cool” editor and says they’ll be switching to it. I have the same question, since someone who’s used Emacs for that long would surely have “seen the light” already. Maybe they’re yak shaving with the config instead of getting work done? That’s one of the few valid complaints I can think of.

I am one of those people who talked about switching from emacs to VS Code. I ended up learning just enough to teach it to my daughter, then stuck with emacs for everything I do myself.

Now that I read about all these younger people switching to emacs I feel even less inclined to "modernize" even though VS Code does look like a nice programmable editor.

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#129
post #8

I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.

I only just understood Emacs about a year ago, despite being a nerd for at least 30 years. I like to think I don't have too many regrets in life - but I'm kicking myself for not realizing what Emacs was way back then - or at any of the times I've tried it out in the past (writing it off as "a text editor")! Never too late though, and on the plus side I've now got decades of hidden Emacs goodies still to discover!

Any suggestions to pick it up without wanting to give up due to convoluted shortcuts?

Re: Emacs 26.2 Released

#130
post #8

I have been using GNU Emacs since the late 1980s. It has been my life's editor, so to speak. At 59 1/2, it seems unlikely that I will ever switch to another editor. It's served me well. I am grateful to the hackers that created it.

Have you had RSI issues? Do you use it with the default keybindings? I've tried it a few times but the default keybindings seem unnatural to me. Not that it's Emacs fault, considering the keyboards they used back then.

I got painful wrists and hands when using Emacs intensively for coding. Viper mode helped but then I transitioned from development to sysadmin and did far less coding. So switched to vi because it was everywhere when Emacs wasn't.[0]

Now that Emacs is everywhere, I'm looking to going back and using evil-mode. We'll see how it goes. I find the customisation on Emacs far less hacky than vim.

[0] I used to grab tapes(!) from Uni to work and compile from source, on a fairly new / obscure architecture at the time.

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