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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#151

Post by catalogia »

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…

Switching from vim to emacs was a virtually seamless experience and a complete no-brainer... yet I put it off for years. Years before I finally took the plunge, I knew I eventually would. Vimscript is awful and although elisp isn't a great lisp dialect, it doesn't have to be great to be better than vimscript (which is abominable.) I shouldn't have put off the switch for so long. In retrospect I'm not even sure why I put it off for so long.

> If I were working on Emacs, my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time-

With emacsclient, I don't think this is relevant. Concern about startup time certainly wasn't part of the reason why I put off switching for so long.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#152

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

josteink wrote: post #111
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.

GTK is the Gimp ToolKit originally, predating GNOME as far as I know.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#153

Post by plorkyeran »

neutronicus wrote: post #98
jrimbault wrote: post #7

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. 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).

I've used macOS for ten years now and I'm still regularly confused by Apple's modifier key glyphs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#154

Post by gnulinux »

retonom wrote: post #131

Who cares about popularity? It often brings more trouble than anything. Emacs is a gem and will probably stay like that for decades to come. 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 son…

I don't think Stallman writes code anymore. It's surprising that he doesn't use org-mode for other, life organization issues, though.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#155

Post by geniium »

Am surprised that a starting point has not been highlighted earlier: the onboarding. To get news users using your product, you have to lower the friction. By making great docs and the environment easy to setup to get started, you can make this process easier.

Why not start with that?

I have always felt that the initial config of emacs has been painful.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#156

Post by olivierestsage »

viklove wrote: post #147
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #120

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 st…

It's because scrolling doesn't actually make sense in emacs or vim, if you've put some time into learning how to use them. In vim, for example, you would be much better off navigating with the keyboard than the mouse. You can leave bookmarks all over the file and jump between them with 2 keystrokes. There are also a multitude of navigation controls ({, }, gg, G, etc.) that save you the time of moving your hand in bet…

I use Emacs all day, every day, and I use the mouse to scroll.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#157

Post by zozbot234 »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #120

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 st…

> 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.

I don't quite see an easy way of fixing that without making it a user-controlled option, though. For example, in text-mode editors it is still common to not have the text cursor scroll past the viewport.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#158

Post by vlowther »

josteink wrote: post #111
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.

GTK came from the Gimp, not Gnome.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#159

Post by stupidthrottle »

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…

> which is the opposite of leadership and the opposite of an experienced person providing valuable guidance to the community.

Following the discussion on Emacs-devel it does seem quite the opposite: you often see people with progressive ideas moderating themselves to not get too out of line with RMS. People (unconsciously?) try beating around the bush, to avoid touching GNU dogma, rather than going straight to the point, communicating efficiently.

While I really appreciate what FSF and GNU has done for computing, I believe the limitations Emacs-developers are putting on themselves by religiously denying to integrate with anything non-GPL (another Stallmanism) is going to hurt Emacs long-term, rather than benefitting GPLed software.

I guess time will tell.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#160

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #96
F-0X wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nee…

There's some bad stuff in emacs but to concern yourself with Meta as opposed to M- is plain silly.

> if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should

Yes, but it's incredibly difficult and frankly the emacs devs have enough to do (and they do it well), and UI design is a very different skillset from programming. Frankly the learning curve for emacs is not going to improve, muchas we both might wish it.

The biggest problem is people want the benefits of freely downloadable software but mainly aren't prepared to give anything back. Go and assist with emacs or some other project.

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