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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#261

Post by Koshkin »

chairfield wrote: post #214
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-mod…

I once opened a textbook of Chinese, read a few first pages and had to put the book away - the characters, while seeming difficult to remember at first, started infiltrating my brain with a frightening efficiency... Same with learning emacs. There is something about it that you mind-meld with it and using it becomes part of your nature.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#263

Post by sachdevap »

serf wrote: post #203
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…

>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 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.

Guilty. I clearly had a blind spot there.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#264

Post by soedirgo »

madballster wrote: post #100

I love emacs because it's fully programmable. This flexibility comes at a cost though, i.e. the time invested making the environment mine; exactly how I want it to be. It's like a sandbox for text based work on a computer. Not everyone is willing to invest this time and therefore IMO it won't be a very popular environment for most users. I don't blame them, everyone's needs and priorities in life are different.

It's the ultimate yak shaver ;-)

Or you could start with a popular .emacs.d (I use Doom Emacs), tweak a few things, and tell yourself "I don't need to modify yet another key binding" a hundred times.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#265

Post by donio »

zozbot234 wrote: post #24
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.

Even by the standards of terminal-based applications, Emacs is far from intuitive or attractive - the text-based IDE's from Microsoft ("Quick" series) and Borland ("Turbo" series) were significantly easier to use. (As another example where *nix systems could improve a lot, the Midnight Commander tty app is great, but still not quite as intuitive as the old 'DOS Shell'. Weirdly enough, I find that other TUI apps, such…

> Even by the standards of terminal-based applications, Emacs is far from intuitive or attractive - the text-based IDE's from Microsoft ("Quick" series) and Borland ("Turbo" series) were significantly easier to use.

They may be easier to learn (since they have pretty minimal functionality compared to Emacs) or easier to discover when you are new to them but they are definitely not easier to use. I use Emacs not because I am some kind of masochist but because it is the easiest way to get my stuff done.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#266

Post by tsimionescu »

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…

As a regular emacs user, I can tell you that start-up time is one of the lowest things on my priority list of things that I wish would be improved.

Emacs is not vim. Emacs is not designed to be a program you open for every file. Emacs is and IDE. You open it every time your computer starts, and then you go to Emacs and find files from there. Occasionally, you'll have a file and want to look at it, and then you'll use client mode to have it open in a new buffer in your already opened Emacs window/terminal.

I do agree that this is not the way anyone starting out would use a text editor. But if this way of using it is not comfortable to you, you'll be fighting so much of emacs that you really will have a miserable experience, regardless of startup time.

Just to hammer the point home, normally if I connect to a Linux system and want to edit a config file, I would do the following: either `sudo vim /etc/hosts` or `emacs` and `C-x C-f /sudo::/etc/hosts`. I don't think too many people would run `sudo emacs /etc/hosts`.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#267

Post by Koshkin »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #160
JoshTriplett wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> Go and assist with emacs

I have a freaking book to write...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#268

Post by soedirgo »

celeritascelery wrote: post #74
microcolonel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Emacs has been a steady upward trajectory, gaining understanding and access to functionality. I now use CIDER and TRAMP every working day, and no true equivalent exists for any other editor (though many are catching up to CIDER, due to Clojure being the better lisp!). The biggest problems with Emacs, to me, are the rendering performance, the lack of sufficient threading, the default keyboard-access…

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

  ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
isn't present until Emacs 24. After all these years.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#269

Post by kick »

kgwgk wrote: post #249
kick wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple; it's got a significantly-smaller barrier to entry than Emacs, and breaks fewer core-assumptions. Is that agreeable to you? The thread on the mailing list was basically guesses as to why Emacs has lost popularity & methods of regaining it, and the lwn article is primarily focused on just relaying it. The thread itself doesn't point to all…

> 'press i and then basically everything works as you'd expect' is pretty simple If that means that you can press letters in they keyboard and see them appear in the screen that’s also true in Emacs... and you don’t even have to press ‘i’ for things to start working as expected.

Emacs breaks assumptions of the operating system; vi does not.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#270

Post by blihp »

jrimbault wrote: post #4

> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." I'm sorry to react to first quote, but as I kept reading I kept coming back to it. My thoughts on that : how you present yourself is how you want (and are going) to be judged. In general I think Emacs has been user-hostile, as said here, just by its terminology. Nobody outside a minority…

When it was written, there were no widespread GUIs. Standardized keyboard layouts on computers were just starting to be a thing. Many of its users were using terminals, not workstations or PCs. So they adopted, and probably more often invented, terminology and conventions for a world that predated almost everything people today know and understand.

So it's not user-hostile, it's just really old. The knee-jerk answer would be 'well just update the conventions/terminology'. The problem is, update it to what? There is no timeless terminology they can use. As the tech industry increasingly resembles the fashion industry, they'd need to slap a new coat of UI paint on it at least every 10 years to keep up... as what was 'user friendly' terminology today won't be in not too many years. So now the developers are spending a big chunk of their time 'modernizing' it rather than actually making it better... not something most developers are interested in doing for a passion project.

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