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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#211

Post by dfabulich »

dan-robertson wrote: post #123
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…

Emacs itself starts fast. Most people who use emacs have a lot of packages that load on startup or autoload files that need to be read and this makes startup slow. Maybe if saving an image were easier then things would be faster but I think most serious users don’t care because they start emacs once a week

Out of the box, Emacs is slower than vim, and this is part of the reason why Emacs isn't installed by default on distros. Serious users don't care about startup performance, but that helps to explain why Emacs isn't gaining new users. Emacs isn't the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#212

Post by hardwaregeek »

acomar wrote: post #186
_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 adju…

Oh yeah you could definitely implement this with some nice config. But that's the problem: only insane people like fiddling with configuration that much.

I know my gateway to emacs was spacemacs. Except spacemacs, when I used it, was slow as heck. When VSCode feels snappier than emacs, something's wrong.

People talk about rewrites far too often but I wouldn't mind a significant rearchitecture/rewrite of emacs. Stuff like this^[1] makes me think it's long overdue.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#213

Post by dfabulich »

celeritascelery wrote: post #115
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…

Startup time can actually be really good if you configure it right. Stock Emacs is about 150ms for me. There is also a portable dumper that will save your Emacs boot Image to memory for faster loading. Also check this out. https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/f3ed3r/how_is_doom_e...

Sure, or you could use "emacs -Q," but all of those performance improvements are off by default, and it seems like they always will be. As long as that's true Vim will always be the quicker and easier way to modify a file.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#214

Post by chairfield »

olivierestsage wrote: post #101

I hear a lot about the declining popularity of Emacs, but I always wonder how much it is overstating the case. As a tech enthusiast but (mostly) non-programmer, my perception has actually been that the "cool factor" of Emacs has been on the rise. Around 2011 or so, I hardly ever saw mention of it online. Now a day hardly go by on places like Reddit's "unixporn" board that someone doesn't post their slick setup with E…

Anecdotally, I started learning Emacs a few months ago and am very happy with my decision. I first considered trying roughly 10 years ago, but didn't see the thriving package ecosystem I see today, starting with projects like Spacemacs and Doom. After some time trialing my options, I stuck with Spacemacs, and that choice saved me time in reaching my goal of transitioning my knowledge and project management to org-mode.

Even with training wheels, though, getting started wasn't simple. It's had a very choose-your-own-adventure feel to it. After some early thrashing, I've now found my favorite resources, have a decent sense of what's out there, and am even using org-mode to track my overall learning progress. It's become self-reinforcing.

With more modern tools getting better and better, I find it no surprise that VS Code and others are gaining market share, and that the Emacs user profile is becoming less diverse. But I think there will always be a place for a tool(box) as powerful and configurable as Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#215

Post by samatman »

Yuioup wrote: post #171
olivierestsage wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Emacs does support navigation via arrow keys by default, unless I am misunderstanding what you mean.

Ten minutes after I posted my message I just realized that the concept of a Macro has been around since the dawn of computing and is in large part responsible for the meteoric rise of Microsoft (along with a lot of viruses) What I mean is I'm looking for a editor with macro capabilities that can be programmed in, say, Javascript, Python or Lua.

Neovim is an editor with macro capabilities, which can be programmed in LuaJIT.

It's my terminal editor of choice, and yes, arrow keys work. But why would you want to use them?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#216

Post by dfabulich »

daffy wrote: post #113
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…

emacs -Q opens instantaneously

Not as fast as Vim. I just tried it on a 500KB SQL script; Vim opened instantly. emacs -Q took a while to flash something on the screen.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#217

Post by samatman »

blackrock wrote: post #179

One thing is to make the keyboard shortcuts better. Get rid of the ancient and archaic method of Ctrl-C to start a command chord. Reserve that for basic commands like copy and paste. Instead, use the slash, Ctrl-/ to start a command chord. This way, you can use all the nifty shortcuts you want, and still not interfere with common commands. Another feature is to use Ctrl-Spacebar to allow a search of command aliases.…

> Instead, use the slash, Ctrl-/ to start a command chord

This has an obscure problem, of which you were no doubt unaware.

In the terminal, Ctrl-/ sends backspace. Emacs isn't commonly used in the terminal anymore, but it can't become useless in the terminal, and this change would make it useless.

Unfortunately this is a non-starter.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#218

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

luu wrote: post #198
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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. I don't really buy this line of argument in general, but I think Josh is a particularly poor candidate to pull rank on because they don't contribute to open source. I don't know Josh, but I recognize his name from his open source contributi…

Consider me very regretful indeed. Most people who moan seem to have nothing to contribute, well I got it very wrong this time. Apologies to @JoshTriplett if you're reading this, and Ill check out your stuff tomorrow.

Ah shit, I recognise your name too. I've just been spanked by Dan Luu. This has not been a good night.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#219

Post by JoshTriplett »

luu wrote: post #198
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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. I don't really buy this line of argument in general, but I think Josh is a particularly poor candidate to pull rank on because they don't contribute to open source. I don't know Josh, but I recognize his name from his open source contributi…

Heh. My website is drastically outdated (by a decade), but thank you nonetheless.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#220

Post by dfabulich »

catalogia wrote: post #151
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…

You put off learning Emacs partly because you learned Vim first. But why did you learn Vim first? Because people around you were already using Vim. Because Vim came preinstalled. Because Vim was quicker and easier to just edit a file.

Startup performance isn't about persuading fence sitters. It's about becoming the default, the option people pick without even knowing why they picked it.

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