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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#41

Post by gmfawcett »

itchynosedev wrote: post #20
alexchantavy wrote: post #11

Outside of the text editor, I think native emacs keybindings like (C-n, C-p, C-a, C-e, C-k) on OSX are great and I hope they never get rid of them.

I agree! You know what takes it to the next level? Sticky keys! Accessibility feature in macos where modal / control keys will "stick" for the next keypress (non-modal / control) and then release. Double tap will stick it for the duration until the next tap on the same key. Essentialy, double tap control key and move around with n and p keys, kill with k, move more, yank somewhere else with y. All without touching co…

Your suggestion sounds a little bit like Emacs' god-mode:

https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#42

Post by cg505 »

agentultra wrote: post #29

Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scriv…

Developer experience is more than just technical too. I know some package authors (and myself personally) find themselves very disillusioned with the GNU approach to contribution, especially regarding licensing and copyright assignment.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#43

Post by agentultra »

cg505 wrote: post #42
agentultra wrote: post #29

Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scriv…

Developer experience is more than just technical too. I know some package authors (and myself personally) find themselves very disillusioned with the GNU approach to contribution, especially regarding licensing and copyright assignment.

Good point!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#44

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rglullis wrote: post #33
forrestthewoods wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.

Emacs' notation for keybindings uses C for indicating the Ctrl/Cmd key and M for the Meta (alt). Things like C-c C-v are chords. and . I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.

> I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.

Yeah, but it's still a control key. I mean, xev literally registers "Control_L" when I press the key that is physically labeled "Caps Lock".

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#45

Post by gmfawcett »

jrimbault wrote: post #27
forrestthewoods wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.

It's usually the Ctrl key, but most emacs users would rebind that. So it's not the Ctrl key.

Some users will rebind it, I don't think we can say "most" unless we have some data to support that.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#46

Post by dmortin »

kick wrote: post #32

I think a large part of the issue is the default keybindings (the GUI is also bad, but I think it's bad in a way that's not going to be impossible to fix without screaming from people who like what's already there). It's truly only lacking a decent text editor. This isn't to say that the keybindings never made sense; in the stage of computing before X, where Space Cadet-like keyboards were common, it was more than fi…

> You launch the tutorial/tour/whatever it's called and immediately it yells at you to use C-v to jump to the next page. And then M-v to go backwards! If you're a normal user, your response is probably something along the lines of, "Like, why?"

The hardcore emacs users think these keys are better. And don't want to change them, because then they had to rewrite the whole manual which uses these keys.

The user don't have to use these keys, though, so there is no point in the tutorial starting with them.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#47

Post by jwdunne »

Ataraxic wrote: post #25

Popularity is more of a marketing problem than an editor problem. At the same time, if we compare emacs to vscode, vscode simply requires less configuration to get going. Given how much tooling exists in the javascript ecosystem, I think having a few plugins "just work" goes a long way. Asking users to configure emacs from scratch to have a reasonable editing experience in their programming language of their choice i…

At work, I moved from Emacs to VS Code about a year ago. I’d used Emacs for years but I was spending a large amount of time fixing package upgrade problems. I guess I’d got into some kind of dependency hell. Maybe I wasn’t experienced enough with Emacs to use it professionally. But that’s the kicker, I haven’t had that problem switching to VS Code.

Having all of Elisp and all of Emacs available, including packages, is powerful. But it comes with a complexity cost if your config/dependency graph grows to large. Like any in-house software project really - of which a small business cannot afford to invest in.

There is one area, though, I’d use it again for: Lisp. Clojure with CIDER, CL with SLIME. As far as IDEs go, the level of language support for Lisp is phenomenal and without equal (but not surprising given Elisp).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#48

Post by KMnO4 »

tjr wrote: post #40

Just got a new Mac computer with Catalina pre-installed, and was surprised to see zsh: command not found: emacs Of course, I can (and did) install it myself, but it used to be included by default.

I imagine that Apple is trying to remove GPL-licensed software from macOS. Similar to the replacement of Bash (GPL) in favour of Zsh (MIT).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#49

Post by snazz »

dmortin wrote: post #39
snazz wrote: post #37

I think that the Emacs concept is really good, but it clearly has a lot of problems that make it altogether unattractive to new potential users. - The keybindings are not the standard CUA ones. Even with Cua Mode, every page on the internet still suggests using the regular old Emacs keybindings. There's weird conflicts between some packages, especially if you use non-default keybinds like Evil. The defaults are not e…

> To get anything approaching the productivity of an editor like Sublime or VS Code, you have to spend hours installing packages, learning their unique keybindings, and sorting out conflicts. Isn't it the same with VIM or other free editors?

To an extent, yes, but I would say that the Vim philosophy involves utilizing external tools much more than in Emacs. Vim packages like the one for Go (https://github.com/fatih/vim-go) feel better-integrated into Vim than the equivalents do into Emacs. This is mostly subjective, so I can see where you're coming from.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#50

Post by superbaconman »

Honestly the hardest part about emacs for me has always been documentation. Like how do I build a plugin. What function do I call to set a custom key binding? This stuff has always been so hard to find despite it being so important to the underlying experience. Now that I've used it for a while I know these things, but they didn't come easily.
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