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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#91

Post by acomjean »

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.

It used to be. But on a lot of default linux installs its not installed by default either.

then you have to pick a emacs...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/297170/how-to-install-emacs-...

For some reason I now have 2 versions installed on my pop-os, (I know to pick the first one when I launch from a gui..)

I love the editor, I really like the macros, and can move around and do my editing quick.

but I've been using it 10+ years and have NO idea if I'm using it correctly.

Certain modes aren't installed depending on and its just kinda obtuse. "Space emacs"? How do install a plug-in again.. where is my .emacs config file? is it init.el? ...

sigh..

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#92

Post by Koshkin »

azinman2 wrote: post #81

The Emacs community has held itself back by continuing the line of thought of resisting anything that fundamentally changes what they already have spent years learning and know. It's their power tool, and using tools is important for humans to do their craft. So I understand why they don't want anything to change. Meanwhile new generations of people have different tools and aren't held onto these past ones because th…

I can imagine a few ways emacs could be improved, but "a new direction for it," I can't.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#93

Post by simias »

I wish Vim users and Emacs users would unite to improve Spacemacs. It's really a great idea IMO, have the editing power of Vim with the flexibility and elegance of the Emacs environment.

Unfortunately when I tried Spacemacs (coming from Emacs) I kept bumping on rough edges with vim command emulation which ended up with me switching directly to the real vim. It's been about a year now and while I still think I was right to finally make the switch to modal editing, vim feels like a clunky and hacky environment compared to the power of Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#94

Post by sachdevap »

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…

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

This is a commonly seen complaint, and I do not completely disagree with you. But really, if there were better options to create an editor on top of some sort of lisp-machine equivalent, why are there such few equivalent editors out there?

I would be happy to move to a new mature ecosystem that allows the sort of flexibility offered by emacs, on which tools like magit and org-mode may become popular, but I am yet to find anything in the same ballpark.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#95

Post by azinman2 »

Koshkin wrote: post #92
azinman2 wrote: post #81

The Emacs community has held itself back by continuing the line of thought of resisting anything that fundamentally changes what they already have spent years learning and know. It's their power tool, and using tools is important for humans to do their craft. So I understand why they don't want anything to change. Meanwhile new generations of people have different tools and aren't held onto these past ones because th…

I can imagine a few ways emacs could be improved, but "a new direction for it," I can't.

And that's why it'll slowly go extinct.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#96

Post by JoshTriplett »

F-0X wrote: post #18
jrimbault wrote: post #4

> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." I'm sorry to react to first quote, but as I kept reading I kept coming back to it. My thoughts on that : how you present yourself is how you want (and are going) to be judged. In general I think Emacs has been user-hostile, as said here, just by its terminology. Nobody outside a minority…

> And the old "I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer". Actually, its an extremely important point. Tools which optimise for the professional are better than those which do so for the noob. Whenever you can achieve both, do so, but never side with the beginner otherwise. People should learn their tools, and they shouldn't be beginners for long, so making things "friendly" at the cost of rewarding experti…

This is absolutely true. However, if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should. One way to do that is to not gratuitously invent new terms, and to use terms people are familiar with.

Using conventions like "M-x" throughout the documentation, even with a note at the front of the manual that "We refer to Alt as Meta for historical reasons.", is needlessly baroque. Worse yet, maintaining a distinction that those aren't effectively the same thing for almost all users is needlessly unhelpful. (Yes, it's possible to make Alt and Meta different keys under X with use of modifier maps. That explanation belongs in an "advanced keybindings" chapter late in the documentation.)

It's certainly possible to learn that, and a hundred other gratuitous weirdnesses, but they don't actually add value that justifies imposing that weirdness on every user.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#97

Post by timmy-turner »

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…

While elisp has lots of warts and weirdnesses stemming from ages long ago, I find it quite suited for its task as an editor scripting language.

For instance, the global namespace is great to play with and learn commands in the scratch buffer. Also the custom datastructures and generally the emacs lisp abstractions around editing are a joy to use.

I agree though that the rendering is too old fashioned. I'd love for Emacs to get smooth, animated scrolling instead of that tty-esque line-by-line movement of the text. That really makes it hard to keep track when scrolling throught large documents.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#98

Post by neutronicus »

jrimbault wrote: post #7
microcolonel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody outside a minority of devs refers to Ctrl+c as C-c. First, C-c is not Ctrl + c; second, it really helps to use compact notation when you read a lot of keybindings; and third, this is approximately the most minor complication in the learning curve of Emacs (otherwise nobody would learn vim, with its insane key mappings and invisible mode transitions).

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. Words once written don't need to be abbreviated. Abbrevation is only useful when writting for speed. When writting for being read don't use them.

I think that is wrong actually.

I find it harder to scan my eyes over Ctrl+Alt+a than C-M-a (notice that Apple, too, uses single glyphs for modifier keys).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#99

Post by dfabulich »

Emacs might never catch up to Visual Studio Code, which is actively funded by Microsoft, but intuitively, it seems like Emacs ought to be able to catch up to Vim. It's always been weird writing Emacs extensions in ELisp, but it's not like Vimscript is a top-tier language. Emacs is hard to learn, but so's Vim.

I think it comes down to performance, especially startup time. Emacs developers have never cared much about it, and I think that's connected to its reputation for "bloat."

The death knell rang when Linux distros stopped distributing Emacs by default; Emacs isn't installed by default on Ubuntu or Fedora, say nothing of macOS or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

If I were working on Emacs, my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time--to get the first page of text to show up faster than Vim--and my #2 goal would be to convince the major distros to include Emacs by default.

Sadly, I don't think any of this will happen. Stallman is too far out of touch, not just with newbies, but even with active users of Emacs. As the article points out, he's never even used Org mode! https://lwn.net/ml/emacs-devel/E1jR5ss-0001xM-L9@fencepost.g...

EDIT: I know you can do some non-default techniques to make Emacs start faster. But that won't get Emacs to be installed by default on popular distros. Installing more plugins won't make Emacs the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#100

Post by madballster »

I love emacs because it's fully programmable. This flexibility comes at a cost though, i.e. the time invested making the environment mine; exactly how I want it to be. It's like a sandbox for text based work on a computer.

Not everyone is willing to invest this time and therefore IMO it won't be a very popular environment for most users. I don't blame them, everyone's needs and priorities in life are different.

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