Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#181

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

antipaul wrote: post #53

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.

Please never get rid of this As a user of these key binding in both Emacs and macOS, it’d be worse than cutting off an arm if this went away

Or next-paragraph/last-paragraph movement.

Or all movement combined with prefixes. I regularly do

  C-u C-u C-p

to jump sixteen lines backwards. Or add another prefix and it's 64 lines.

Separately, macros, yea! Macros with regexes FTW! The counter you can use in macros - occasionally very useful! M-x occur! Dired which can search a whole directory tree of file contents for a regexp! So much more.

Only thing worse than emacs interface is not having emacs at all.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#182

Post by kick » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #129

kick wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You read a little bit more and eventually get to cursor control. Wow, somehow they managed to pick the only possible thing less intuitive than 'hjkl'!

The initial experience of vi is that you learn six keys to press to make it do things, and go from there. Emacs is significantly more complex than that, starting out.

It's definitely not intuitive, but it's an order of magnitude of difference from Emacs, which could be described as anti-intuitive.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#183

Post by catalogia » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:25 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…

> 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.

Is this coming from a workstation-oriented mindset? On laptops with touchpads, scrolling with your "mouse" makes a ton of sense even for seasoned touch typists. I don't always use it for scrolling, but I frequently do. However when I'm sitting in front of a workstation with a traditional keyboard and mouse arrangement, I do avoid the mouse.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#184

Post by snazz » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #55

NelsonMinar wrote: post #9

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.

(1) There is GUI Emacs (what you should probably use). (2) There's no better environment available for dealing with text (including notes, papers, slides, email, &c.) than Emacs. Why do you hate future programmers so much?

GUI Emacs is a very thin GUI skin on TTY Emacs. As an example someone brought up elsewhere in this thread, you can't scroll (with the mouse) in Emacs without bringing the cursor with you. Scrolling without moving the cursor doesn't make sense in a TUI environment, so it doesn't exist in the GUI version either.

Your second point is very subjective and most people are bound to disagree with it. You certainly can't argue that like it's an objective fact, because it's very much not objective.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#185

Post by state_less » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

wayneftw wrote: post #57

agentultra wrote: post #29

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…

Perhaps adding JavaScript to the list of languages that you can extend Emacs with would be a good start - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage

Or, emacs in the browser. Popular editors like VS Code use monaco and now github has codespaces [1] which is running in the browser.

People live as much or more in the browser as the terminal these days, so bring the emacs sauce to where the people live. Maybe you could get some of the c compiled to web assembly, and the lisp would follow? It'd be neat to open a buffer to the page emacs lives in and start editing, call JS code, or embed emacs into a page as easily as monaco. Maybe the GUI components could be made out of HTML 5?

1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide...

PS. Rough sledding for Gitpod with this announcement.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#186

Post by acomar » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

_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…

I think it's possible to implement this as an extension on top of evil? trigger a bookmark when the user starts scrolling, jump back to the bookmark on keystroke in insert mode.

but yeah, there's generally a problem with the UI/UX -- like as a consequence of the problem you're describing, you have to clear your current selection before scrolling to paste from the kill buffer. it's all foibles you learn about and adjust to but it makes the environment feel unpolished on a first impression.

spacemacs and doom have a better impression out of the box but there are just some core problems that they can't fix with a clever configuration. one that frustrates me regularly is auto-complete (company) triggering a network call that's bound to time out (because of user error) and the whole editor hanging for the duration because the completion call happened in the same thread as the UI. actually, the single threaded nature of most of emacs is probably my biggest complaint...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#187

Post by Koshkin » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #95

Koshkin wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

Been, what, 30 years, people saying that... Slowly, very slowly indeed.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#188

Post by ssivark » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

cg505 wrote: post #42

agentultra wrote: post #29

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.

> very disillusioned with the GNU approach to contribution, especially regarding licensing and copyright assignment.

TBF, given the historical FUD baggage, I don't fault them for trying to play extra safe as stewards of the project. Also, Emacs makes it so easy to get packages out-of-band (eg: MELPA, Borg, Straight, Quelpa) that I don't think the copyright assignment is a big deal unless one wants to get code merged into base Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#189

Post by jshaqaw » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

I love Emacs. I don't use it beyond dabbling. The contradiction? I'm not a full-time computer professional. Keeping Emacs stable and running just takes too much bandwidth. It's a tool for dedicated professionals who get a massive return on their investment spent optimizing and maintaining their Emacs setup. Sadly as much as I love the idea of Emacs, I don't personally get enough productivity return to justify the investment. It's not a flaw with Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#190

Post by chongli » Thu, May 07, 2020, 9:35 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…

Vim and Emacs have too many philosophical differences for this to work. For example, emacs doesn't have a fixed concept of what a paragraph should be. Instead, it leaves that up to the major mode. This is fundamentally incompatible with vim's paragraph motions which are determined by empty lines and remain the same regardless of file type.

As a very long-time Vim user, I prefer that my editing commands be predictable since I type them with muscle memory (faster than ordinary conscious thought). Having them vary from file to file based on file type (the Emacs way) throws me off completely and makes the editor feel untrustworthy, like a horse that's liable to kick or throw its rider. Vim feels like a complete set of high quality, manual woodworking tools.