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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#71

Post by rglullis »

jrimbault wrote: post #35
microcolonel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid. No, you're just being ignorant, and not reading when people try to answer your questions. > Abbreviation is only useful when writing for speed. When writing for reading, don't use them. It's not an abbreviation, it's a different symbol. C is not Ctrl. The software has some “baggage”, being the he…

And yet I could get a few things done in vim in a few minutes, and much more than that in a few weeks. And I choose not to use vim. And yet you said vim has insane key mapping but more people somehow use vim than emacs. Some things are not adding up. Emacs has excellent documentation but somehow very few people are able to use it. Some things are not adding up. Emacs interface and community mannerisms _are_ user-host…

Hey, chill.

There are lots of things that seem daunting at first and unforgiving to the impatient beginner: chess, surfing, martial arts, drawing... it doesn't mean that any of those are user-hostile, it just means that those that want to learn and master it will need to develop a certain discipline.

If you don't want that, fine. But what is the point of going around and saying that those who do enjoy these things are stupid?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#72

Post by dhosek »

taeric wrote: post #2

Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.

Getting started with Emacs and having basic skills (load, save, cut, copy, paste, search) is WAY faster than with vi. I don't use more than a tiny fraction of emacs's capabilities and likely never will, but the initial part of the learning curve is way easier than it is with something like vi.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#73

Post by dmortin »

mwfunk wrote: post #51

How on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the existence of Org Mode, and how on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the concept of outliners, and why on earth, when he finally figured out what Org Mode did, was his immediate response to be super dismissive because it wasn't something that he's interested in using personally? He sounds like some random person spewing random subjective opinions about things, rather than the origi…

> How on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the existence of Org Mode, and how on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the concept of outliners, and why on earth, when he finally figured out what Org Mode did, was his immediate response to be super dismissive because it wasn't something that he's interested in using personally?

He seems out of touch even with modern emacs packages. He doesn't use any of them, doesn't even know what they do, I guess he uses the same config since the 90s, doesn't try new packages, he's more interested in preaching the GNU message.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#74

Post by celeritascelery »

microcolonel wrote: post #14
taeric wrote: post #2

Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.

My experience with Emacs has been a steady upward trajectory, gaining understanding and access to functionality. I now use CIDER and TRAMP every working day, and no true equivalent exists for any other editor (though many are catching up to CIDER, due to Clojure being the better lisp!). The biggest problems with Emacs, to me, are the rendering performance, the lack of sufficient threading, the default keyboard-access…

As someone who claims to be using "the better lisp" what is it about elisp that you find "unergonimic and sad"? Genuinely curious.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#75

Post by arm »

For me, I’ve recently started using Emacs solely due to wanting to try out rust-analyzer¹ (not touching Visual Studio Code since it uses Electron), and I’m really enjoying how insanely customizable Emacs is! The ecosystem around Emacs looks great too, with quite a few packages I´m interested in trying (like Magit²).

――――――

¹ — https://rust-analyzer.github.io/blog/2020/04/20/first-releas...

² — https://magit.vc/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#76

Post by sirn »

microcolonel wrote: post #14
taeric wrote: post #2

Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.

My experience with Emacs has been a steady upward trajectory, gaining understanding and access to functionality. I now use CIDER and TRAMP every working day, and no true equivalent exists for any other editor (though many are catching up to CIDER, due to Clojure being the better lisp!). The biggest problems with Emacs, to me, are the rendering performance, the lack of sufficient threading, the default keyboard-access…

Likely a polar opposite of Clojure, but there is an attempt to add Guile (a Scheme dialect) to Emacs[1] which aims to provides a faster Elisp backend, and support for using Scheme to program Emacs.

[1]: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#78

Post by agentultra »

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #36
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…

I largely agree with you. Out of curiosity, where do you think Unicode support could be better?

Completeness, speed, and defaults would be nice.

I'm mostly satisfied as a user. I'm working on a mode for editing emojicode[0] and it's a weird edge case but it'd be nice if emacs worked out of the box with nice defaults for this sort of thing. More experienced library authors might have more to say about it.

[0] https://www.emojicode.org/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#79

Post by jolmg »

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…

How do you fix your con,

> - There's no namespacing between packages. They can run right over each other and cause weird bugs. This isn't theoretical; it's what happens when you have a bunch of packages installed. Sorting out performance issues caused by the interactions between packages is very challenging.

without sacrificing your pro?:

> - From anywhere in the editor, you can run code---you don't need to make a new package to be able to execute a snippet of Elisp.

The fact that you can go to any package source file, modify a function and reload it on the currently running emacs instance (with C-M-x/eval-defun) kind of depends on definitions being standalone and at the top-level.

You can have namespacing in the form of prefixing identifiers with the package name. If there's name-clashing between packages, it's because they didn't follow that convention.

What more would you want out of namespacing that you can get without sacrificing or limiting that pro you mentioned?

> Edit: I should also add that Elisp is an absolutely terrible programming language when compared to more modern alternatives.

There are many reasons to hate pretty much anything. I'm not sure how you expect one to respond, if you don't give some idea of what it is that you find terrible about it. It's always pros and cons with most things.

"modern" also doesn't mean anything. Are you talking about languages that were invented recently or that are still maintained, evolving, and/or used despite being invented in "non-modern" times? Where does "modern" even start?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#80

Post by sachdevap »

dmortin wrote: post #38
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…

Popularity means more users and more contributors. I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them?

> I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them?

What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways, and also of note here is remacs - I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust.

And popularity does not always mean more contributors, not when they are just the consumers of the product. The drop off in delta contributors / delta consumers is fast.

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