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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#201

Post by Koshkin »

azinman2 wrote: post #134
Oekeai wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't understand your point. We're not talking about physical things, we're talking about software. Software is always changing, morphing, adopting, and growing user bases. It's what's amazing about it compared to hardware. My 2012 MBP runs the latest OS from approximately 8 years later, and with it a whole new slew of features and additions that both Apple and the rest of the world have brought it. Why be stuck in…

> Why be stuck in the past?

I surely would want to go back to the pre-corona days.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#202

Post by zozbot234 »

jshaqaw wrote: post #189

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 inv…

You only have to setup Emacs once, there's no maintenance involved.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#203

Post by serf »

sachdevap wrote: post #80
dmortin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity means more users and more contributors. I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them?

> I guess most of the core emacs devs are greybeards who started programming in the 80s or earlier, so what happens when they grow too old? Who will replace them? What makes you say that? I don't think this is true. Not among the package maintainers anyways, and also of note here is remacs - I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. And popularity does not always mean more contributors, not when they are just t…

>What makes you say that? I don't think this is true.

the same thing that probably made you say this :

>I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust.

emacs is an older software package, from the 'original home of hackers', extended in a (sorta) language that is notoriously connected to old-school AI and academic programming. The holy war of vi vs. emacs has raged for decades -- and emacs/vi/lisp jokes are some of the oldest computer geek jokes in existence.

I can imagine the fans skew older then say fans of something like Electron or Flutter.

The only computer-geek-joke-theme that I can think of that'd be older would be the billions of COBOL jokes -- but that's just because i'm too young to have heard the billions of punch-card and wire-routing jokes that inevitably existed before I was here.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#204

Post by hardwaregeek »

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've done the "look ma no mouse" thing where you just use your keyboard. Heck, I used to have an emacs config where scrolling would scroll through my undo/redo tree^[1], which lemme tell you, confuses the hell out of other people using your computer.

But ultimately sometimes executing some annoying combo of C-v/C-s/M-f/M-b is less ergonomic than using the wonderful invention that is scrolling. Especially if you want to aimlessly scan through code instead of purposefully navigate.

I suspect part of the reason for emacs being a hard sell is the reputation of emacs being an all or nothing platform. You're supposed to not use the mouse, do everything in emacs, write elisp to make everything super automated and awesome. And sure, you can do that! But it's okay to be a bad emacs user. It's okay to use the mouse. It's okay to not write elisp. It's okay to use other apps. VSCode doesn't come with a religion. I don't think emacs should either.

[1]: Inspired by this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1806/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#205

Post by pvg »

kick wrote: post #182
pvg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Vi has text input modality, unlike essentially, well, anything. It's an entirely different model of operation which it shares with no current software and hasn't for a quarter century.

It's strange to be talking about the UI details of vi/emacs (both, by current standards, about equally super-weird) when the article itself is a kind of perfect vignette of the organizational dysfunction of the group that maintains emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#206

Post by dnquark »

I was about to jump ship to VSCode, but lsp-mode (despite minor hiccups) has extended my Emacs' expiration date.

So if I almost gave up, after having lived in Emacs for the last 12 years, can we really expect much popularity with those that are new to computing?

In 2020, Emacs is mostly just for people that love to build or customize their tools, or for folks that want a better Vim (i.e. Doom Emacs). And to customize Emacs you have to have a basic understanding of modes, hooks, keymaps, etc -- as well as at least rudimentary knowledge of elisp. Getting good at that stuff is a multi-year-long process. Emacs will never be "popular" for the same reason that if you want to have a fun night with friends, (statistically) chances are you'll choose to play Rock Band as opposed to learning real instruments. But as is the case with many niche and challenging things, it's hella fun and rewarding once you've spent a few years doing it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#207

Post by dfabulich »

rcfox wrote: post #116
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…

If you use the Emacs server/client, then it is very fast to open a file from the command line. But I prefer to just open files from within Emacs. With ido-find-file, I get fuzzy path matching, which makes it fast to find whatever. Rather than worrying about startup times, I'd have them work on including a lean set of quality of life extensions by default, like ido.

1) I bet Stallman's never used ido.

2) You already use Emacs. What would it take to get a new user to use it? It would have to be installed by default, and be the quickest and easiest way to edit a file. That means startup performance.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#208

Post by celeritascelery »

microcolonel wrote: post #172
celeritascelery wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who claims to be using "the better lisp" what is it about elisp that you find "unergonimic and sad"? Genuinely curious.

At least when I've written elisp, the default datastructures have involved a lot of work to construct and manipulate, and when you do it right, the ones you've chosen for convenience may perform so poorly that you have to go back and change them to get your program to complete in time. Namespaces for vars and functions being not a language feature is inconvenient. Unless you are using fakespace or intern-symbol (it s…

You should check dash[1]. It adds a lot of those "many little things" from Clojure (such as ->, and ->>, and let) to elisp.

[1]https://github.com/magnars/dash.el

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#209

Post by chacha2 »

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…

Is it really too hard to imagine why the creator of the Free Software Foundation would rather people use a free software text editor over the current proprietary alternatives?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#210

Post by craigsmansion »

jshaqaw wrote: post #189

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 inv…

> I'm not a full-time computer professional.

Emacs is used by non-computer professionals as well. If your profession relies on the manipulation of text, emacs is the tool to use.

>their investment spent optimizing and maintaining their Emacs setup.

It's really not that bad. Say you're a fiction writer: you only need to figure out your preferred workflow once, but then you can use it for decades with only minimal changes.

Of course, once you get the hang of it, you might think it convenient to be able to write short mails directly, or do a bit of your own typesetting all from the comfort of your, by now, favourite editor, but .emacs files usually see very little churn. What's in a .emacs has usually just accumulated slowly over the years as one's usage of the program increases.

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