Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#161

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

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…

> its reputation for "bloat."

Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. ;-)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#162

Post by tarentel » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

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…

I don't think spacemacs and the vim emulation, evil, have anything to do with each other. I switched from vim to emacs a while back and haven't had any issues with evil mode.

As far as spacemacs goes it seems neat. I tried it once but it was too confusing and I've been using emacs for so long now that it's very finely tuned to what I need it to do.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#163

Post by raverbashing » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

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…

Vim might be hard, but besides jokes about "how to quit it", it makes much more sense than Emacs.

Emacs key combinations are weird. Discoverability is low. Even Vim will now tell you how to quit if you Ctrl-C it.

Meanwhile I have opened Emacs and I'm trying to quit it (spoiler: Ctrl-x Ctrl-c). Some things are actually interesting and it tries to help at first but then it goes back quickly into emacs-babble that doesn't help much.

The case for vim is simple: a quick editing of a file when you might not have a window manager up or on a terminal.

I don't see many reasons to learn Emacs when VSC, Atom or other editors exist.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#164

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #13

There 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.…

VSCode doesn't do much of what I need to do, and what it does do, it doesn't do as well as Emacs can.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#165

Post by DonHopkins » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

linuxhansl wrote: post #62

It's still popular with me :) In fact instead of being in either the vi or emacs camp, I use both. I also use Eclipse. Each of them for the task at hand.

Eclipse was designed and named to piss Sun off, and it worked.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#166

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #83

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-c is a chord (two keys pressed at once); C-c C-v is a chord progression (first one chord, then the other), more often referred as a sequence in this context.

Right you are. Using Emacs for 20 years and I still can't get to explain it to people properly.

"You have to press these 2 keys at the same time" I don't understand your difficulty.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#167

Post by DonHopkins » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

From: rms@AI.MIT.EDU

In general, the way for a problem to be fixed is for someone who knows how to fix it right simply to do so. Any solution that involves discussion should be avoided except as a last resort, because it is inefficient.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#168

Post by kickingvegas » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

alexchantavy wrote: post #11

Outside of the text editor, I think native emacs keybindings like (C-n, C-p, C-a, C-e, C-k) on OSX are great and I hope they never get rid of them.

FWIW, native emacs keybindings are there on iPadOS and with the ability to swap caps and control in 13.4, life is sweet.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#169

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

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…

Meta is not always Alt. Some people use ESC for the Meta keybindings.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#170

Post by snazz » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

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'm genuinely curious: do you not read through code from top to bottom? That's a very common thing that I do, and using the mouse is a comfortable way of accomplishing it.