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IRC and Emacs all the things

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Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#41

Post by catblast »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #35
happyrock wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave Emacs another good-faith effort recently, via Spacemacs. I really bought into it, wanted to make it work, and forced myself to use it for all text editing. But despite every intention of working through all of the quirks and oddities and endless customization, and with the stated goal of reaching Emacs enlightenment, I gave up after a month or so, deleted it from my machine and resolved never to try again. It…

I hate to tell you this, but it's not Emacs that's slow and clunky, it's Spacemacs. I dumped Spacemacs and spent a couple days building a new config with everything I used from Spacemacs and it is a good 10x faster. It shouldn't be surprising, seeing as Spacemacs development ground to a complete halt (no new releases) something like two years ago. Spacemacs is a neat demo of what is possible with Emacs but it adds a…

Doom emacs I think demonstrates that have you can something all around nicer both form and function than spacemacs with absolutely amazing performance. My emacs install on a Sandy Bridge toaster with hundreds of packages configured is ready to go in about half a second.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#42

Post by msla »

happyrock wrote: post #32
iLemming wrote: post #26

> Not having a general text editor at your disposal for when you have to input/manage loads of text is like being a carpenter and only having a hammer in the toolbox. Once I learned Emacs to the sufficient level, I felt that. Today, I can't even imagine typing any text in anything else but Emacs. Having all the tools you need at your disposal - spellchecking, thesaurus, dictionary, word lookup, translation, etc., fee…

I gave Emacs another good-faith effort recently, via Spacemacs. I really bought into it, wanted to make it work, and forced myself to use it for all text editing. But despite every intention of working through all of the quirks and oddities and endless customization, and with the stated goal of reaching Emacs enlightenment, I gave up after a month or so, deleted it from my machine and resolved never to try again. It…

Emacs is fast and responsive in my experience, as I'd expect relatively small software to be; the old jibe was Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping, after all, but if your system can't devote eight megs of RAM to a text editor you've got other problems.

Are certain extensions slow? I won't say "no", because there's a ton of them out there, which is probably part of the problem here: My Emacs isn't your Emacs, my set of extensions and modifications isn't yours, and, therefore, my experience with Emacs isn't yours.

I don't find Emacs clunky, but I like chorded UIs and I know the basic Emacs workflow by muscle memory at this point. I can't say if it's clunky or not because my hands know it, so I don't think about it anymore. There was a time when I didn't know it that well, so it was clunky for me, but I would have gone through the same period with Vim.

My big reason to stick with Emacs is that it's stable. There's a stable core, composed of C and the core Emacs Lisp libraries, which is unchanging, so my muscle memory is never punished by someone deciding that keys should work differently now so we're going to improve all of them you're welcome. I can keep my configuraton files and my hands and everything continues to work, which seems to be counter to the trend of modern productivity software.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#43

Post by iLemming »

microtonal wrote: post #36
giggles_giggles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to tell you this, but it's not Emacs that's slow and clunky, it's Spacemacs. I dumped Spacemacs and spent a couple days building a new config with everything I used from Spacemacs and it is a good 10x faster. It shouldn't be surprising, seeing as Spacemacs development ground to a complete halt (no new releases) something like two years ago. Spacemacs is a neat demo of what is possible with Emacs but it adds a…

Agreed. I started with Spacemacs, which showed what is possible in Emacs. But it is so horribly slow and breaks so often that I couldn't use it more than a few weeks. Then I started with a blank init.el and just added packages (with use-package ) as needed. Now it's fast and it still has the functionality that I need, things also rarely break (and thanks to Nix I can always roll back). The main idea that I stole from…

The thing about Spacemacs many people don't get - it does not liberate you from learning Emacs internals. The good thing about Spacemacs that it simplifies one of the most challenging things about Emacs - discoverability.

The hardest part of Emacs is to learn what Emacs can do, what it offers. And many gems are hidden under so many layers, that people may not even know about them after decades of using Emacs every single day.

And Spacemacs can be fast and predictable. But you need to know where and how to tweak it to make it so. For the past few years of me using Spacemacs, I had maybe three of four incidents when after updating things, something would break in a way that it would take me longer than ten minutes to find a workaround.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#44

Post by clarry »

iLemming wrote: post #43
microtonal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I started with Spacemacs, which showed what is possible in Emacs. But it is so horribly slow and breaks so often that I couldn't use it more than a few weeks. Then I started with a blank init.el and just added packages (with use-package ) as needed. Now it's fast and it still has the functionality that I need, things also rarely break (and thanks to Nix I can always roll back). The main idea that I stole from…

The thing about Spacemacs many people don't get - it does not liberate you from learning Emacs internals. The good thing about Spacemacs that it simplifies one of the most challenging things about Emacs - discoverability. The hardest part of Emacs is to learn what Emacs can do, what it offers. And many gems are hidden under so many layers, that people may not even know about them after decades of using Emacs every si…

> The hardest part of Emacs is to learn what Emacs can do, what it offers.

Nah, for me the hardest part is finding out about all the things it doesn't do. Unless you code it. Maybe you find some half-arsed packages, but they might just make you more frustrated.

For example, I still haven't found a way to do vim-like completion. I still haven't got a good cscope interface that doesn't crap all over my windows (a common problem for many things in emacs, not just xcscope). I still haven't found a way to make my custom keybindings just work everywhere; every so often I happen to end up with focus in a window where, for example, my normal window navigation bindings don't work and I'd have to go out of my way to fix it.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

dfboyd wrote: post #20

Slack is working hard to prevent this kind of interoperability; the incentive for them is to push ahead on features, and being abstract-able behind bitlbee or libpurple impairs that. They have deprecated the API token (called a "Legacy Token" on their site) that bitlbee uses, and there's a sunset date of May 5 2020.

Cann't bitlbee switch to that scheme Ripcord uses, with an auth token taken straight out of a web request to "normal" Slack in the browser? Or is Slack going to plug that hole as well?

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#46

Post by Barrin92 »

dilap wrote: post #39
giggles_giggles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to tell you this, but it's not Emacs that's slow and clunky, it's Spacemacs. I dumped Spacemacs and spent a couple days building a new config with everything I used from Spacemacs and it is a good 10x faster. It shouldn't be surprising, seeing as Spacemacs development ground to a complete halt (no new releases) something like two years ago. Spacemacs is a neat demo of what is possible with Emacs but it adds a…

As a devoted emacs addict, I can attest that plan old emacs is also pretty slow and clunky, though I could easily believe spacemacs is even worse! My dream editor would combine the flexibility of emacs w/ the speed and quality of sublime.

>As a devoted emacs addict, I can attest that plan old emacs is also pretty slow and clunky

it's true in the sense that it's true for almost anything once you start to add a plugin or two or add personal customizations.

The only thing for me that is actually consistently, superfast is terminal vim without any plugins. Which is too barebones for my daily use.

In a realistic, daily working environment with all my stuff loaded emacs is clunky, but not necessarily slow. It's honestly still pretty responsive.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#47

Post by iLemming »

dilap wrote: post #39
giggles_giggles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to tell you this, but it's not Emacs that's slow and clunky, it's Spacemacs. I dumped Spacemacs and spent a couple days building a new config with everything I used from Spacemacs and it is a good 10x faster. It shouldn't be surprising, seeing as Spacemacs development ground to a complete halt (no new releases) something like two years ago. Spacemacs is a neat demo of what is possible with Emacs but it adds a…

As a devoted emacs addict, I can attest that plan old emacs is also pretty slow and clunky, though I could easily believe spacemacs is even worse! My dream editor would combine the flexibility of emacs w/ the speed and quality of sublime.

Quality? I think Emacs (for what it does) is a product of superb quality. I just checked - I pull over 400 packages (including built-ins). Can you imagine Sublime, VSCode, or Atom with 400 plugins installed? I don't even know if you can find that many useful plugins for them, but even if you do, I think at best it would just hang them indefinitely.

And these are not 400 "dead-weight," useless packages. These are real programs that very often tightly integrate with each other. Some of them like Magit and Org-mode are quite serious products by themselves.

Sure, there are decades-old issues in Emacs, and they are slowly, steadily being worked on. The problem with long lines is getting fixed. JSON performance got improved with jansson. Elisp native - some people reported a 300% speed boost. Rendering improvements with Cairo - no longer experimental; Native line numbers are in the stable version of Emacs; People today discussing using Tree-sitter for parsing, which would significantly improve syntax-highlighting. And many other things are slowly being improved.

Things move slowly in the Emacs world. We have many smart people, but we don't have enough of them to contribute and move things fast.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#48

Post by usr1106 »

tyrust wrote: post #29
dfboyd wrote: post #20

Slack is working hard to prevent this kind of interoperability; the incentive for them is to push ahead on features, and being abstract-able behind bitlbee or libpurple impairs that. They have deprecated the API token (called a "Legacy Token" on their site) that bitlbee uses, and there's a sunset date of May 5 2020.

They used to run an IRC relay, too, but got rid of it years ago.

And XMPP. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/slack_cuts_ties_to_...

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#49

Post by jasonzemos »

Arathorn wrote: post #3

could also Matrix and Emacs all the things, just sayin’ https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el :)

It's cool to see Matrix work inside emacs but I think the spirit of the OP alludes to putting a little emacs in Matrix too. Composing messages in that band-aid at the bottom of Riot is a great example of a stress-inducing UX. Some venues around Matrix deserve high quality content and it's difficult to encourage that when people write and proof posts through the peephole.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#50

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

kencausey wrote: post #10
u801e wrote: post #8

The contrast level they used for the text in the article makes it too difficult to read.

Surely everyone knows about Reader mode by now? More seriously, is something like Firefox's Reader mode available as a plugin to Safari? I can confirm that it is for Chrome.

Safari ships with its own Reader View.
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