IRC and Emacs all the things • Hacker News Board

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#51

Post by theelous3 » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 10:17 AM UTC

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.

Yeah, that was a frustrating day for me. I went from running all of my IM through my IRC client, to being forced in to a combination of my IRC client and the slack desktop native app, to eventually giving up on slack altogether as it was heavy and finicky, providing nothing more (for me) than any simple IM client.

I firmly believe we're just in a bad place on the whole in terms of IM/voip systems for personal use and org use. Nothing is really good enough. The only ones that live up to expectations are mumble and IRC - the absolute no-nonsense of them leaves expectations low and exceeds them. Had slack taken a more open route and stopped being so org focused it had the potential to do really well (in the "good ecosystem" sense, not in the financial sense as clearly they're doing fine.)

Nothing bridges the gap between personal social use, informal org use (gaming, loose projects), and actual org use. How is it that mumble and teamspeak etc. are still far superior voip clients to literally all other offerings, including the well funded and supposedly mature discord which should be excelling here. Only thing mumble/ts can't do is replace voip telco systems, which in fairness nothing else does either.

Slack can't do voip for shit, discord can't even do notifications, irc can only manage offline message history if you're highly tech savvy or pay for it, whatsapp requires a phone with an active connecion and is clumbsy for ephemeral groups (telegram is fairly similar), gitter doesn't even come in to the picture, matrix has the shittiest public servers in the history of technology, xmpp is esoteric gobbeldygook.

The whole space is a mess.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#52

Post by eadmund » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 10:20 AM UTC

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.

Fortunately it sounds like the tokens used by emacs-slack are supported. If not then I am going to start pressing for my company to leave Slack. Life is too short to use a browser UI instead of Emacs.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#53

Post by omaranto » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 10:50 AM UTC

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…

Clunky? Yes (adorably so for us Emacs lovers, but I understand this can be problematic for new users). But slow? That doesn't sound like Emacs, it's probably some misbehaving third party package included in Spacemacs that made it feel slow.

Also, it doesn't seem quite fair to blame Emacs for inscrutable interaction between third party packages, rather than blaming the packages involved in the interaction.

If you do ever try Emacs again, hold off on using third party packages. The bar for getting a package admitted into Emacs is higher than just putting it up on GitHub, so naturally the built-in packages tend to be more robust on average (which is not to say there aren't many excellent third party packages, there are!, but it's reasonable to be more weary of them than of built-ins).

Also, could you say a bit more about how you found the Emacs documentation puzzling? I love the documentation, it's thorough and very readily accesible. I don't use IDEs (because I have no use for them) but if their documentation is even better than Emacs's I might play with one just to enjoy the documentation.

(Finally, if you meant Spacemacs's documentation ignore the previous paragraph: I have no idea what its documentation is like, I was only talking about Emacs.)

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#54

Post by AlbertoGP » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 11:19 AM UTC

catblast wrote: post #40

tra3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, I think it's a pretty fair assessment. Emacs is dense, obscure and what is these days called "opinionated". You gotta remember though, that Emacs is from mid 70s. There's a lot of legacy there, but also a lot of refinement. Lots of brilliant people have spent a lot of time improving it over the years. You shouldn't think of Emacs as an editor; it's a text processing system. In other words it supports lots of…

> "opinionated" I feel this term might need to be officially dead and buried. If something as customizable as emacs is deemed opinionated what does this even mean? For chrissakes there are people that consider emacs to be a better vi implementation than vim.

Well, there are lots of customizations doable (I’m still rocking my .emacs from the 1990’s going through several platforms, Linux→MacOS→Linux, refined over the years with custom functions etc.) but to name a single example: my keyboard does have a Find key, and I tried mapping isearch-forward to it instead of the default CTRL+S. That’s trivial, but then, you know how you can press CTRL+S again to go to the next result? Well, that key combo is hardcoded in LISP. So yes, you technically can remap isearch-forward, but in a useless way.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#55

Post by maurits » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 11:39 AM UTC

Every 6 months or so I do the vimsublimeemacs dance. I really want to like emacs and really believe in its central tenants.

Its not that it is hard, but I just can't get over the fact that it seems to not work very well. Buggy, slow, bewildering documentation, fresh installs that are broken, it all wears me down.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#56

Post by clarry » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 12:30 PM UTC

omaranto wrote: post #53

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…

Clunky? Yes (adorably so for us Emacs lovers, but I understand this can be problematic for new users). But slow? That doesn't sound like Emacs, it's probably some misbehaving third party package included in Spacemacs that made it feel slow. Also, it doesn't seem quite fair to blame Emacs for inscrutable interaction between third party packages, rather than blaming the packages involved in the interaction. If you do e…

Emacs OOTB sucks and some of the most useful packages will never be built-in, because developers don't want to deal with license assignment and locking themselves to the slow release cycle of Emacs. Also the community can be discouraging.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#57

Post by omaranto » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 12:41 PM UTC

clarry wrote: post #56

omaranto wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clunky? Yes (adorably so for us Emacs lovers, but I understand this can be problematic for new users). But slow? That doesn't sound like Emacs, it's probably some misbehaving third party package included in Spacemacs that made it feel slow. Also, it doesn't seem quite fair to blame Emacs for inscrutable interaction between third party packages, rather than blaming the packages involved in the interaction. If you do e…

Emacs OOTB sucks and some of the most useful packages will never be built-in, because developers don't want to deal with license assignment and locking themselves to the slow release cycle of Emacs. Also the community can be discouraging.

"Emacs OOTB sucks" People say that, and those people are entitled to their opinion. (A word of warning: I think many people who say that are not actual Emacs users.) I'll keep happily using vanilla Emacs while people complain about it, though.

Of course, I don't really use it OOTB, I mean, I do have a configuration. My 700 line init file installs some 20 third party packages from MELPA, and changes a lot of defaults. I've also written about 1200 more lines of Emacs Lisp distributed among some 25 tiny packages I use. But I did start with Emacs OOTB and never thought it sucked, I thought instead, over and over, that some minor aspect could do with some tweaking. :P

And not locking yourself to Emacs's slow release cycle is a perfectly valid reason for not wanting your packge to be built-in. I don't think there is anything wrong with the fact that many excellent third party packages will never be built-in.

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#58

Post by henry_flower » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 12:46 PM UTC

AlbertoGP wrote: post #54

catblast wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "opinionated" I feel this term might need to be officially dead and buried. If something as customizable as emacs is deemed opinionated what does this even mean? For chrissakes there are people that consider emacs to be a better vi implementation than vim.

Well, there are lots of customizations doable (I’m still rocking my .emacs from the 1990’s going through several platforms, Linux→MacOS→Linux, refined over the years with custom functions etc.) but to name a single example: my keyboard does have a Find key, and I tried mapping isearch-forward to it instead of the default CTRL+S. That’s trivial, but then, you know how you can press CTRL+S again to go to the next resul…

> that key combo is hardcoded in LISP

isearch-forward turns on a minor mode that has it's own keymap

a snippet from isearch.el:

  (defvar isearch-mode-map
    ...
    ;; Several non-printing chars change the searching behavior.
    (define-key map "\C-s" 'isearch-repeat-forward)
    (define-key map "\C-r" 'isearch-repeat-backward)

hence to redefine C-s, to, say F12:

  (global-set-key [f12] 'isearch-forward)
  (define-key isearch-mode-map [f12] 'isearch-repeat-forward)

& so on

I don't see what is the problem here

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#59

Post by preek » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

memling wrote: post #24

preek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. You've guessed what we're using the last couple of weeks. So far, I like it! It's come a long way. I've tried it a couple of times, but now even the web client works reasonably well. And yes, of course - alphapapa software is always the best option!(; P.S.: Nice nick! After waiting 20 years, I just watched the trilogy (extended version) with my wife last week. It's been a blast and it aged really well.

> After waiting 20 years, I just watched the trilogy (extended version) with my wife last week. It's been a blast and it aged really well. If you're a fan of makings-of, you'll love the extras on these DVDs. There is some seriously interesting work they did on CGI, AI, motion capture, 3-D scanning, et c.

Thank you very much for the pointer! We will certainly have a good time watching the extras^^

Re: IRC and Emacs all the things

#60

Post by happyrock » Sun, Mar 08, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

omaranto wrote: post #53

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…

Clunky? Yes (adorably so for us Emacs lovers, but I understand this can be problematic for new users). But slow? That doesn't sound like Emacs, it's probably some misbehaving third party package included in Spacemacs that made it feel slow. Also, it doesn't seem quite fair to blame Emacs for inscrutable interaction between third party packages, rather than blaming the packages involved in the interaction. If you do e…

re: The documentation, I found the standard Emacs docs good enough to learn high-level Emacs concepts and such, but whenever I went searching for the nuts and bolts of how to configure specific bits of functionality, the documentation I stumbled upon (it's rarely easy to discover) either a) assumed a high level of proficiency and understanding of Emacs internals, often accompanied by (or consisting entirely of) large snippets of Emacs LISP b) was written in a kind of reference style that failed to give much context or help the user along in any way, or c) would be contradicted or superseded by some other piece of documentation, usually because of subtle package incompatibilities (probably exacerbated by Spacemacs in my case).

The Emacs community does not seem to have converged on a particular documentation idiom so there is a wide range of documentation quality for various configuration use cases. Most of the time I ended up finding bits and pieces of answers on Stack Overflow or other message boards, and proceeding with a lot of trial and error. That is fun sometimes, but not all the time; it was a rare experience when the documentation really nailed it for me. There does not seem to be much thought to the user experience on the whole.