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.
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Making Emacs Popular Again
121–130 of 782 posts
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#122Does 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…
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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#123Emacs 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 itself starts fast. Most people who use emacs have a lot of packages that load on startup or autoload files that need to be read and this makes startup slow. Maybe if saving an image were easier then things would be faster but I think most serious users don’t care because they start emacs once a week
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Newness contradicts creativity, because the creative process needs to result in objects that last. In fact, because new designs create a future need for more new designs, it cannot last by definition!
Think of shops that sell novelty items. Newness at an object level looks like novelty items. What is the quality of novelty items? How long do novelty items last?
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#125A 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.
Okay, but even if GTK is a GNU project or a FSF project, why does that mean it qualifies for being part of a future GPLv4 licensed EMACS, and QT does not? Both are available under the LGPL. I wonder if Stallman expects that a GPLv4 would likely or definitely be incompatible with LGPL3. I don't think it's because the LGPL version would be bumped if a v4 came out; GTK is still on LGPLv2.1
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#126There is a human aspect to software, and when you forget that, and try to force people to adapt to software instead of adapting software to people, you come up with software that naturally is difficult and unpleasant for people to use. Emacs is built on a philosophy of human nature that deemphasizes the subjective personal experience in favor of (a limited group of people’s theory of) the objective ideal experience.…
> In a short amount of time, VSCode and it’s ecosystem has almost equally matched what Emacs and its ecosystem took 30+ years to create. I'm not $o $ure that'$ actually a$ impre$$ive a$ it $ound$ ;)
I think you're making the point that a majority of VS Code was funded by Microsoft, and therefore it can't be compared to Emacs which was either mostly or entirely coded by volunteers?
The vast majority of Emacs's usefulness is its ecosystem. Several Emacs clones have been made in a very small amount of time, but none have caught on because they lack the ecosystem and community. So it's only really fair to compare VS Code's ecosystem with Emacs's ecosystem. And VS Code's ecosystem was created by unpaid volunteers too.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#127I use Emacs and love it, but the problem as a newcomer is that basic questions never have basic answers. The answer is either in the form of a complex incantation, or requires one to come to grips with new abstractions.
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#128I 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?
If you ever start to develop Emacs Pinkie as I did you may come around
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
vi is less unintuitive, as I noted above.
I am having trouble finding that in your long comment. The initial experience of using vi and emacs are hardly different in some fundamental way so either being unintuitive seems like a poor way to explain their respective popularity (or lack thereof).
Re: Making Emacs Popular Again
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
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