131–140 of 782 posts
The only thing I wonder about is how it is possible that Stallman seems to have never heard about org-mode which is one of the main reasons I use Emacs and I don't think there exists anything that even comes close.
I manage my todos with org-mode, generate chord sheets of my songs and even produce my website from org files.
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Have you ever used some of the other popular choices? Pleasant is rarely an accurate term for computer use. And I'm not saying lie. Just stop scaring people away. Emacs is by far one of the most empowering programs out there. Market that. She realize that it is marketing. You want to build a market of users? You have to have some marketing.
Remember that Emacs is competing with things like Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, etc. If you tell people that it's easy they're going to try it, bounce off, and conclude you have no idea what you're talking about. If, instead, you tell them what you like about it more than those others they might find they agree with you.
I'm not saying to merely claim it and call it a day. I'm saying claim it while showing people how to use it. Make it a dialog that doesn't begin with, our way is harder. It isn't harder. Just different.
The kindest thing we could do for future programmers is let Emacs and all tty-oriented editors die. There are much better options now. UI has improved a lot since the 1970s, let's embrace it.
I’m sorry, what? Which modern editor has tools like SLIME or CIDER?
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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?
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.
ultimately, emacs improved because of them.
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…
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.
Visual Studio Code, the editor that I use daily, is based on Javascript (Typescript) but I have yet to see a page by Microsoft explaining to me that I can quickly whip up a script and execute it in my editor. From what I understand you need to create an extension and I think that takes a bit of setup.
A spiritual successor to Emacs could be an extensible editor based on a language which you can interpret on the fly, modifying your environment as you go along. That's what would make Emacs more attractive to me, along with modern keybindings like arrow keys...
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Even by the standards of terminal-based applications, Emacs is far from intuitive or attractive - the text-based IDE's from Microsoft ("Quick" series) and Borland ("Turbo" series) were significantly easier to use. (As another example where *nix systems could improve a lot, the Midnight Commander tty app is great, but still not quite as intuitive as the old 'DOS Shell'. Weirdly enough, I find that other TUI apps, such…
The issue isn't "intuitive or attractive". It's something more like "powerful, learnable, extensible". Nothing else scores as highly on that triad of qualities as Emacs.
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…
> my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time
You have some weird priorities
> Stallman is too far out of touch ... but even with active users of Emacs
FUD! He monitors the emacs bugs list. Also I just 2 days ago got a response from him personally regarding emacs. Note: personally.
No credibility for you, sunshine.