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Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

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Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#71

Post by OskarS »

mickeyp wrote: post #34
cold_fact wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I constantly find myself duplicate lines in vim (shift+y). You've never had to edit a line that's really similar to another? Or when debugging, I don't want to change the old code, so I copy the line, comment it out, and work with the duplicated line. You've never had to do that?

Well, everyone edits things in different ways. The Emacs way of solving a workflow problem is instructing Emacs how to solve it for you. For instance, you mention: 1. Copy the line the cursor (point) is on; 2. Insert the copied line below/above point; 3. Commenting out the line you copied; By the sound of things you do 1 and 2 with a command in Vim and the 3rd option with another command. In Emacs, I would simply pro…

The point is that "duplicating a line" is a very fundamental building block to other operations, and it should be supported natively. For instance, lets say you have to do several different function calls with only minor differences, you might write it out once and then duplicate a few times, then go in and edit them.

"Writing a function for the full change" is simply not a tenable thing to do. "Duplicate a line" is fundamental in the same way that "go to start of line" or "indent this line one more tabstop" is.

As someone who has spent years using both Emacs in "Emacs mode", and vim/evil-mode, there's no question to me that the modal vim-style editing is superior to Emacs's. That's not to say that "Emacs mode" is bad: it's far superior to most editing styles. Just not evil/vim :)

Don't get me wrong: I adore Emacs, and I use it for hours and hours every day. But if it weren't for evil-mode, I would go back to Vim in a heartbeat.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#72

Post by dleslie »

jwr wrote: post #5

There are lines in my Emacs config files that are older than some of the programmers I work with, so I can relate. Contrary to what some people think, Emacs does not require constant tweaking and wasting time on configuration. I revisit my setup every couple of years or so, and I always find it is time well spent, as my productivity goes up as a result. I do not know of a better environment for multi-language program…

And it will only get better once it understands LSP, better than it does now. It's a pale copy of VSCode's incredible LSP implementation: for a user, simply clicking the button to install the extension automagically configures a fully functional language environment; even for C++. Most of the time.

When last I tried to get decent C++ support working with Emacs, about a year ago, it was still a mess of compiling rtags/cquery, installing global, configuring per-project variants, sacrificing ungulats, hail baphomet.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#73

Post by ilikehurdles »

worldsayshi wrote: post #29
Isamu wrote: post #3

(from the slides) >I learned Emacs in September, 1983 >It is now November, 2019 >...that’s over thirty six years! >An amazingly long time. Hmm, I think I learned Emacs around the same time. Yes, sometimes I think it is weird that I'm still using it. I get a lot of pushback when I say that the developer environment hasn't advanced amazingly in all those years. Devs will point to one or more rather small incremental im…

The main reason I quit Emacs was the lack of context and semantically aware code completion and re-factoring tools. Such tools are invaluable productivity boosts for me. I have never gotten that to work in Emacs to a satisfactory degree.

Coincidentally, I quit java for almost the same reason.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#74

Post by AlanYx »

jypepin wrote: post #47

I really started to get lost when he started talking about never wanting to leave his text editor, wanting to read his emails in Emacs, browse the web in Emacs, have slack and discord in Emacs, etc. Serious question: Why? Is it that hard to alt+tab? Especially, why would you want such distracting features inside your editor, while you are trying to focus and work?

It helps if you reframe your question. Emacs facilitates working outside of silos. If you're using Outlook for e-mail, for example, there are some built-in mini-silos you can interoperate with (decent calendaring, decent contacts database, fairly simplistic task management, etc.), but if you want to take notes about an e-mail you received, you might end up alt-tabbing to OneNote and then pasting some text, then writing a deadline down there and then alt-tabbing to Outlook to set up a reminder (there is separate reminder functionality in OneNote but it's rudimentary), then alt-tabbing to Slack and maybe adding a comment there related to the e-mail. The promise of Emacs is working in a single environment for all of this. One more-or-less consistent interface on top of everything.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#75

Post by ilikehurdles »

mapgrep wrote: post #65
jordigh wrote: post #8

So the slides say... > Concurrency safety isn’t an accident. So far,only Rust has a good story on concurrency thanks to its type system. Is that really true? I've really enjoyed concurrency in D. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/#day18 How much better can it be? And yes, D's concurrency is also based around types.

Doesn't Clojure have a pretty good concurrency story as well? (Which I find particularly relevant since it is a Lisp.)

Yes it does. Writing concurrent code in Clojure out of the box is a blast, and for the more advanced use cases there's core.async.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#76

Post by alpaca128 »

eruci wrote: post #42

I've never seen the need to use anything other than vim.

Same here. I've tried getting into Emacs for a couple days but gave up. It would mean a lot of effort just to achieve a similar proficiency, for little gain(better syntax highlighting, a few small features).

I think the deeper you're already in one of the ecosystems the harder it becomes to switch and the returns diminish further. In my case I'm very comfortable with Vim combined with a tiling window manager and terminal buffers, and I can't stand Emacs' control scheme. So at this point it's simply not worth it.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#77

Post by bachmeier »

benreesman wrote: post #39
commandlinefan wrote: post #11

Emacs - the editor that STILL doesn't have a simple way to duplicate the current line?

I think the germane point about Emacs here is that some people like writing Lisp and some people hate it. If you hate it Emacs is likely not going to be your best environment, and that’s fine. I really like writing Lisp so Emacs has a simple way of doing anything I want, but it’s not for everyone.

I think this is a larger problem with Emacs. Duplicating a line is something that should be easy to do out of the box.

And if it's a situation where you really need to make the user define a keyboard shortcut, don't make them do C-c followed by the actual shortcut, let them define single keystroke shortcuts to do what they want. Multiple keystroke shortcuts are so damn annoying.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#78

Post by ant6n »

jypepin wrote: post #47

I really started to get lost when he started talking about never wanting to leave his text editor, wanting to read his emails in Emacs, browse the web in Emacs, have slack and discord in Emacs, etc. Serious question: Why? Is it that hard to alt+tab? Especially, why would you want such distracting features inside your editor, while you are trying to focus and work?

> Is it that hard to alt+tab?

incidentally, alt+tab is broken on MacOs. It cycles between programs, not windows - so if you have mutiple terminal windows open, you're screwed. You can use the alternative alt+` to cycle between windows of the same app, but that doesn't go to the least recently used window, but cycles through them in order - which is also useless when having many terminals open. Then you can pay like 15$ to get a tool like witch (just to get basic OS functionality), but that tool is slow and broken.

So on a Mac it can be pretty hard to alt+tab.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#79

Post by worldsayshi »

lorenzhs wrote: post #64
worldsayshi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason I quit Emacs was the lack of context and semantically aware code completion and re-factoring tools. Such tools are invaluable productivity boosts for me. I have never gotten that to work in Emacs to a satisfactory degree.

Language Server Protocol brings this to many editors that historically lacked it, including Emacs' lsp-mode. I use it a lot (with clangd), it's great. Because it's a common interface used by all editors, there is a lot of interest in and work on the language backends.

I'm all for standardizing this but I can't hear about the Language Server Protocol without thinking about this rant: https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?t=2549

The rant itself is probably misdirected towards LSP when it should be directed to the circumstances that it has to deal with.

Re: Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]

#80

Post by Zelphyr »

I've been writing Clojure lately but I'm a greybeard (literally) Vi/Vim user. vim-fireplace is nice but I can't help wonder if I'm losing something by not using Emacs. At the same time, Clojure is so wonderfully different from the other languages I know that I don't feel like I have the cycles to learn a new editor at the same time I'm learning a new language. Then again, maybe that's the best time to learn Emacs?
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