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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#281

Post by alexhutcheson »

tsimionescu wrote: post #242
Koshkin wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, browser-based front-ends make so much sense today - conceivably including one for emacs (which can work in the client-server mode anyway).

Would you realistically be able to bind enough emacs keybinds in a web page so that it feels natural? Or would you need some extra extension to help with that? I'm not very familiar with how easy it is to capture browser keybinds in a web page.

You pretty much need an extension that runs in a separate window. You can already use Emacs through the Secure Shell[1] Chrome extension, but if you run it in a tab the browser eats too many key combinations for it to be useful. If you launch it in a separate window, then very few key combinations get intercepted and it works quite well.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/iodih...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#282

Post by ableal »

blihp wrote: post #270
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…

> Many of its users were using terminals

Perhaps an example will be more vivid. In the eighties most people who were on the internet worked on a 24 line by 80 column terminal. Some people used Emacs buffers as a predecessor to multiple windows on large screens:

- Edit your code, perhaps splitting the screen in two buffers to look at different files or places in a large file.

- Split yet again one buffer for compilation error messages.

- Split the other one for a shell subprocess to run the program, check mail, etc.

Basically all-Emacs all day. Not my setup, but I saw it done often enough.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#283

Post by Scarbutt »

DonHopkins wrote: post #165
linuxhansl wrote: post #62

It's still popular with me :) In fact instead of being in either the vi or emacs camp, I use both. I also use Eclipse. Each of them for the task at hand.

Eclipse was designed and named to piss Sun off, and it worked.

Fun fact about the Eclipse name, thanks.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#284

Post by fhennig »

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…

I haven't heard of the decline or rise of the popularity of emacs, but from personal experience it is holding up quite well!

I think par-edit is superb for anyone building stuff in some lisp dialect. org-mode is unbeatable and I saw quite a few stories on reddit of people getting drawn to emacs because of org-mode. Recently I picked up rust development and the rust-mode is working very well for me, much better than VSCode or the Intellij plugin.

Around university I see many lecturers using emacs too.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#285

Post by j88439h84 »

matthewbauer wrote: post #243
dfabulich wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is a second vs. a half second much of a difference? I think users start noticing at about 5 seconds.

I use vim for quick tasks because of the difference in startup time

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#286

Post by sokoloff »

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?

I submitted a miniscule patch to tcl-mode (or font-lock) a couple decades ago. It was to speed up syntax highlighting for a particular style of commenting. Maybe a 3-6 line patch, tops.

I spent 20x more time back and forth on copyright assignments, including getting a release from my company, etc to get the patch in. I pushed through because I felt like I was always "just one more yak shave away from finishing", but if I knew at the start how much time it was going to take, I'd have kept the patch on our own private site-lisp. That's a problem, IMO.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#287

Post by buzzkillington »

blihp wrote: post #254
downerending wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

What happens when the woke takeover of the SFS is finally complete and emacs is re-licensed under a new social justice license where you can only use it if you don't oppress minorities?

I don't trust the FSF further than I can throw them and I don't trust them with my copyrights.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#288

Post by fhennig »

dfabulich wrote: post #207
rcfox wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That means startup performance.

Or the server/client setup could just be the default and the server starts at system boot.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#289

Post by shagie »

zozbot234 wrote: post #161
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…

> its reputation for "bloat." Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. ;-)

Aside from the Eight Megs... I also recall:

* Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage

* Emacs Makes A Computer Slow

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#290

Post by fhennig »

raverbashing wrote: post #163
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…

Vim might be hard, but besides jokes about "how to quit it", it makes much more sense than Emacs. Emacs key combinations are weird. Discoverability is low. Even Vim will now tell you how to quit if you Ctrl-C it. Meanwhile I have opened Emacs and I'm trying to quit it (spoiler: Ctrl-x Ctrl-c). Some things are actually interesting and it tries to help at first but then it goes back quickly into emacs-babble that doesn…

> Vim might be hard, but [...] it makes much more sense than Emacs.

Counter-point: I think emacs makes much more sense. If you start it, you can navigate a file by clicking in places. It is a GUI application, whereas I think vim is just a terminal program by default?

Emacs has a little built in tutorial (Ctrl+h t) and is quite discoverable (type Ctrl+h ? and it shows you a lot of commands you can use to find out about what functions a chord invokes or how to invoke a function with a key cord). With helm you just type a part of a function and it gives you a list of suggestions.

Within programming languages I think auto-completion is a must-have for discoverability. Otherwise I have to constantly look up stuff in the documentation. And for that company-mode is really nice, I don't know about the vim side of it but I think something like that goes against the philosophy of vim as I understand it?

To me, modal editing didn't make much sense in the beginning and for emacs the learning curve seemed less steep, so that's what I went with in the end. But clearly it must be good somehow, because so many people use and love vim! It's just not for me I guess.

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