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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#111

Post by josteink »

korethr wrote: post #59

A shame Stallman put the kibosh on QT quickly. Is he planning on there being a GPLv4? Not in the "leaving that option open for the future" kind of planning, but more, "A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4." Because if they truly want a cross platform visual interface, AFAICT, QT is the closest you're going to get, and IMO, is the best means of doing so. Every QT app I'v…

> And I don't understand why GTK doesn't have the same issues. It's not a GNU project AFAIK.

Iirc GTK was born out Gnome, and Gnome was born as a FSF-project.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#112

Post by kick »

dmortin wrote: post #46
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 ha…

I pointed out that these would see a great deal of uproar were they to be changed; I'm aware.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#113

Post by daffy »

dfabulich wrote: post #99

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 i…

emacs -Q opens instantaneously

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#114

Post by kick »

pvg wrote: post #56
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…

If that were the case, vim would not be as popular as it is.

vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above. There's also much less, which is really helpful.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#115

Post by celeritascelery »

dfabulich wrote: post #99

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 i…

Startup time can actually be really good if you configure it right. Stock Emacs is about 150ms for me. There is also a portable dumper that will save your Emacs boot Image to memory for faster loading. Also check this out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/f3ed3r/how_is_doom_e...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#116

Post by rcfox »

dfabulich wrote: post #99

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 i…

If you use the Emacs server/client, then it is very fast to open a file from the command line. But I prefer to just open files from within Emacs. With ido-find-file, I get fuzzy path matching, which makes it fast to find whatever.

Rather than worrying about startup times, I'd have them work on including a lean set of quality of life extensions by default, like ido.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#118

Post by celeritascelery »

josteink wrote: post #102
simias wrote: post #93

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 rig…

As someone who really doesn’t “get” or care for Vim, why should I contribute to an alternate Emacs-“distro” entirely focused on an existing Vi user-base, using non-standard conventions and keybindings? I mean good for them having that option, but what’s in that thing for me?

You don't have to use vim keys in Spacemacs or Doom. You can just use the regular ones if you want.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#119

Post by bitwize »

celeritascelery wrote: post #65
dmortin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have doubts about this. Maybe they did some simple variable settings, but I doubt they wrote proper lisp programs.

That's the really cool thing about Emacs. The only difference between "simple variable settings" and "proper lisp programs" is a difference of scale, not a difference of kind. Variable settings are just as much code as anything else in Emacs.

Indeed. (+ 1 2) is a "proper Lisp program". By having all that power available from the start, users can use as much or as little as they need and shape the tool on the fly as they work with it. It's the difference between an extensible text editor and a completely malleable one.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#120

Post by _hardwaregeek »

This is a super dumb example, but I hate that scrolling is tied to cursor. Like if I'm gasp using the mouse to scroll through a file in emacs, the cursor has to stay in the viewport. If I scroll past the viewport, the cursor moves to the viewport. In IntelliJ (which has such good emacs keybindings I can use it for a lot of my work), the opposite is true: when I scroll away from my cursor, it stays there and when I start typing again, my viewport moves to my cursor not vice versa.

It's a small thing but it shows emacs' age. When emacs was written, GUI cursors weren't a thing. Scrolling wasn't a thing. Of course the cursor and the viewport would be connected. There wasn't any other way to move the viewport. Basically emacs needs to be somewhat GUI native.

Emacs should also be more discoverable. It's hard to incrementally learn key commands. I hate that the default for M-x is just a blank line. It's really intimidating. Having some sort of fuzzy search/history like Helm makes M-x so much easier to use.

Basically emacs needs to get UI and UX people to give it a refresh. Nothing outlandish, just get it into the 21st century.

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