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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#271

Post by ChristianBundy »

Koshkin wrote: post #248
serf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of contributors/developers are bothered by the fact that they have to play ball with copyright laws, at all. it's a fact of life for developers with projects anywhere near the GNU-scape that if you don't GNU it, you'll catch a lot of hatred, even worse if you choose to avoid licensing all together -- and gods help you if you choose a tongue-in-cheek licensing agreement like WTFPL. at the end of the day a lot of…

> love and admiration I don't know about that, I hate agendas. A hammer does not have one, and that does not make it a less useful tool.

> A hammer does not have [an agenda], and that does not make it a less useful tool.

Sure, but by default all software has a copyright agenda built in. We can remove copyright, but there are two approaches:

- Remove copyright so that anyone can use your code, but then they can re-add copyright to your code and sue other people for violating their copyright.

- Remove copyright so that anyone can use your code and ensure that nobody can re-add copyright to your code.

I used to be in the former camp, but I've slowly moved to the latter.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#272

Post by a1369209993 »

korethr wrote: post #59

A shame Stallman put the kibosh on QT quickly. Is he planning on there being a GPLv4? Not in the "leaving that option open for the future" kind of planning, but more, "A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4." Because if they truly want a cross platform visual interface, AFAICT, QT is the closest you're going to get, and IMO, is the best means of doing so. Every QT app I'v…

> A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4.

Software-as-a-service under GPLv3 isn't required to provide source code to remote users (AGPL acommplishes exactly nothing in this regard), so there definitely is such a need, but I don't know if RMS is actually working on that.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#273

Post by macintux »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #140
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…

And no actual timings eh? My emacs starts up within 3 seconds. 2 seconds of that is it reopening all the files from my last session and arranging them on screen, saving me quite a few more seconds of doing it manually. > my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time You have some weird priorities > Stallman is too far out of touch ... but even with active users of Emacs FUD! He monitors the emacs bugs list. Also I…

Is there a reason you’re so actively hostile in this thread? You’ve been belittling people in nearly every comment.

You were willing to apologize to well-known contributors, but everyone else can stuff it?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#274

Post by Koshkin »

jrimbault wrote: post #35
microcolonel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid. No, you're just being ignorant, and not reading when people try to answer your questions. > Abbreviation is only useful when writing for speed. When writing for reading, don't use them. It's not an abbreviation, it's a different symbol. C is not Ctrl. The software has some “baggage”, being the he…

And yet I could get a few things done in vim in a few minutes, and much more than that in a few weeks. And I choose not to use vim. And yet you said vim has insane key mapping but more people somehow use vim than emacs. Some things are not adding up. Emacs has excellent documentation but somehow very few people are able to use it. Some things are not adding up. Emacs interface and community mannerisms _are_ user-host…

I do not see emacs interface user-hostile. The UI even has a menu and a toolbar for discoverability.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#275

Post by ledauphin »

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

easily 50% of my "loyalty" to Macs is these built in shortcuts alone.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#276

Post by a1369209993 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #169
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…

Meta is not always Alt. Some people use ESC for the Meta keybindings.

So? Alt is not always Alt either, and apparently for a lot of people Ctrl is actually Caps Lock (to help with RSI?).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#277

Post by Per_Bothner »

microcolonel wrote: post #14
taeric wrote: post #2

Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.

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…

Many years ago I implemented JEmacs (http://jemacs.sourceforge.net/) - a proof-of-concept (i.e. very incomplete) port of Emacs to the Kawa framework. Kawa is primarily an implementation of a nice if-I-say-it-myself dialect of Scheme compiling to the Java VM, but it can be used to compile other languages - specifically Emacs Lisp. JEmacs is long dead but Kawa (https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/) is still actively used and maintained. It has a number of niceties and ideas worth checking out.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#278

Post by macintux »

kgwgk wrote: post #235
snazz wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how I can control the rate at which I scroll with the mouse more easily than with the keyboard. It's a more intuitive movement that I can adjust to match the speed of my reading.

The point is that reading code from top to bottom is not a reason to need or prefer a mouse. Other people prefer using a keyboard and find moving through pages more intuitive than scrolling.

Different people have different preferences, so clearly it is a reason to prefer a mouse.

I don’t use my mouse with Emacs, but I’m not going to tell someone else they’re wrong for wanting to. I’m beginning to see why people feel the Emacs community is less-than-welcoming.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#279

Post by asdkhadsj »

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…

Eh, Vim and Kakoune user here for the last ~15 years, I love scrolling with my mouse and keyboard. Keyboard for when I'm navigating. Mouse wheel for when I'm just skimming code, idly looking for something.

The fact is scrolling with a mouse moves much faster while still seeing what I'm doing. You can't scroll line by line quickly with a keyboard. There's no variable speed (that I've ever seen, at least). However with a mouse I can alternate between fast and slow. Really nice for scanning large piles of text where you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Sure I could jump a screen length at a time if I wanted, but then my eyes have to jump bottom to top to bottom to top every time I jump. I find it difficult to track where I am. Page jumping tends to ruin context, even with a handful of lines as context.

With that said though, I have seen some really nice Terminal renderers that will smear the cursor when you jump. It looks like it would help a lot to keep the visual context.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#280

Post by Scarbutt »

brainsmith wrote: post #244

When I started programming on ruby my laptop couldn’t handle IntelliSense and tests which required too much cpu and ram. So I’ve switched to vim on server through ssh. Later I’ve switched to emacs as it seemed to me more powerful than him back then. After I got MacBook I’ve switched to TextMate utilizing powerful macOS keyboard shortcuts for text navigation. MacBook was pretty fast to handle ruby-related tasks. Later…

I have always used emacs inside tmux over ssh with However, if you truly want your code editor to be local, vscode has truly become king for working with remote environments, nothing else comes close to it, it's really good. They have achieved this by installing a component on on the server that syncs with your local editor, which they won't open source of course.
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