Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#251

Post by dleslie » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

michaericalribo wrote: post #236

julianeon wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users. Color me surprised! I'm turning into a stereotypical Linux greybeard but I must be true to my nature, and endorse Linux for writers. There's this famous story, about the secretaries who mastered Emacs and preferred it to the…

I think you've misunderstood why someone would prefer Scrivener or a word processor: a rich-text ecosystem that "just works", in terms of WYSIWG / rich text editing; being the de facto standard for many non-technical user; and being more than "as simple as Markdown", but actively providing a tight ecosystem focused on writing. Is it possible to recreate some of this functionality in emacs? Definitely. But, it require…

> Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file?

https://orgmode.org/manual/Comment-Lines.html

> You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of.

https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html

https://orgmode.org/manual/Internal-Links.html

https://orgmode.org/manual/External-Links.html

https://orgmode.org/manual/Handling-Links.html

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#252

Post by Koshkin » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #177

sachdevap wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I can't imagine greybeards programming in rust. Why not?

A lack of imagination?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#253

Post by look_lookatme » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

Emacs 100% lacks a reasonable sidebar strategy. I use Visual Studio Code's sidebar for 3 things, navigation via search, navigation via changed files, navigation via directory tree. It is very fast to use all of those, even though they are mouse oriented.

The only comparably fast and useful ripgrep that works out of the box in Emacs is swiper, but it uses a temporary buffer. Deadgreap is great but you have to harangue it behave in a similar way to the sidebar in vs code and even then it's just not the same.

The other thing is emacs regexps suck and PCRE is the standard of every well used regexp implementation in the world at this point and emacs ought to find a way to transition to it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#254

Post by blihp » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

downerending wrote: post #137

cg505 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re copyright, what would you prefer? Alternatively, what would you even do with the copyright to your fixes and additions to GNU emacs?

There's a world of difference between releasing contributions under the same copyright (i.e. if you're contributing to a GPL'd project, release your code under the same GPL license) and assigning copyright to the FSF. I think that's the turn-off for many. It isn't a matter of 'what would you even do with' the contribution, it's a matter of recognition and making it much harder to change the licensing terms down the road.

For those who just want to bury their head in the sand and pretend copyright doesn't exist, they will be the first to complain when the code that they wrote is taken private and commercialized (i.e. look at the licenses this has been an issue for)... making code 'public domain' allows for that.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#255

Post by acomar » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:30 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…

honestly, with lsp-mode, it's pretty dang close to vscode, at least for the languages I care about. and the benefits of evil + a fully configurable editor are too much to pass up. a drop-in replacement for newcomers? no way. but if a powerful environment is valuable for you, like say if you spend a lot of time in an IDE and the shell, emacs's ability to integrate those things and a lot more is too good to pass up.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#256

Post by jakear » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:30 PM UTC

look_lookatme wrote: post #253

Emacs 100% lacks a reasonable sidebar strategy. I use Visual Studio Code's sidebar for 3 things, navigation via search, navigation via changed files, navigation via directory tree. It is very fast to use all of those, even though they are mouse oriented. The only comparably fast and useful ripgrep that works out of the box in Emacs is swiper, but it uses a temporary buffer. Deadgreap is great but you have to harangue…

You can use keyboard for all of those things in VS Code, just by the way :)

(On the team)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#257

Post by orangeshark » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

korethr wrote: post #125

josteink wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Okay, but even if GTK is a GNU project or a FSF project, why does that mean it qualifies for being part of a future GPLv4 licensed EMACS, and QT does not? Both are available under the LGPL. I wonder if Stallman expects that a GPLv4 would likely or definitely be incompatible with LGPL3. I don't think it's because the LGPL version would be bumped if a v4 came out; GTK is still on LGPLv2.1

It is because of the license. GTK's license is LGPLv2.1 or later[0]. The important part is later, It means you can update it automatically to any later version, especially if the new license is not compatible with the previous version. Qt does not offer their software with a similar license.

[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tree/master#licensing-t...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#258

Post by spudlyo » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:31 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

While it's nice that macOS has this out-of-the-box, you can make all the key-bindings to their macOS equivelants using Karabiner-Elements. If it did go away, we'd be fine.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#259

Post by acomar » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #212

acomar wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

definitely. i agree with all of that. i have high hopes for remacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#260

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, May 07, 2020, 11:35 PM UTC

state_less wrote: post #185

wayneftw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ca…

So something similar to what Neovim is doing where it can be a headless backend for any editor that implements their protocol? Like eventually if JetBrains bothers, you wont need a VIM emulator for IntelliJ and co, you can just run Neovim and have it work with IntelliJ directly, without losing any of IntelliJ's benefits. Note: I also mean PyCharm, GoLand, and so on...

Neovim literally has like over 30 projects for new UIs:

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects