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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#301

Post by freddie_mercury »

jmoss20 wrote: post #67
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…

I don't think emacs is "user-hostile" on purpose. You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. Today's users expect different things than users did in the 70s (who expected different things than users in the 80s, 90s, so on). Emacs has been relatively consistent through time, which has been a huge boon to emacs users. The tradeoff is against current user's intuitions…

> You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing.

We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into unsupportable hyperbole. Emacs is nowhere close to unprecedented in its age and not remotely close to the oldest piece of software still in existence.

GNU Emacs is from 1984. It is a reimplementation of the earlier 1972 Emacs. This matters, since if you're including reimplementations then obviously Unix itself, which is used by many of us every day, it older. And if you start counting from 1984...that's not especially old.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#302

Post by wetpaws »

I tried to learn emacs but after the week of struggling through arcane keybindings and the bizzare quirks I just noped. Emacs is cool but it did not age well in a way that any software with three decade+ history would.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#303

Post by phyrex »

fernandotakai wrote: post #194
simias wrote: post #93

I wish Vim users and Emacs users would unite to improve Spacemacs. It's really a great idea IMO, have the editing power of Vim with the flexibility and elegance of the Emacs environment. Unfortunately when I tried Spacemacs (coming from Emacs) I kept bumping on rough edges with vim command emulation which ended up with me switching directly to the real vim. It's been about a year now and while I still think I was rig…

i'm a major vim users (10+ years now), and honestly? i don't care about spacemacs. emacs and vim are philosophically too different to be together. i tried spacemacs and it was like trying to fit a square peg on a round hole -- it just doesn't work properly.

Speak for yourself, I used vim for a decade and have since switched full-time to spacemacs in mixed mode! :)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#304

Post by decasteve »

wayneftw wrote: post #57
agentultra wrote: post #29

Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scriv…

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 Elisp in script tags in html. Can already browse pure html in eww.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#305

Post by fhennig »

kick wrote: post #269
kgwgk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> '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.

What does that mean?

In vi if I press "i" I can't use the arrow keys to navigate the text as normal. In emacs I can. I'd say using the arrow keys for navigation in text fields is a very widely accepted functionality. So isn't it vi breaking the expected behavior here?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#306

Post by pseudalopex »

zozbot234 wrote: post #180
plorkyeran wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used macOS for ten years now and I'm still regularly confused by Apple's modifier key glyphs.

Those aren't "Apple's glyphs", they're part of the ISO/IEC 9995 standard for common keyboard layouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995 Perhaps Emacs and the Linux desktop should start using these characters by default, seeing as they now have good Unicode support.

Control and Option/Alternate are different. Most keyboards and most software don't use either set.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#307

Post by agumonkey »

decasteve wrote: post #304
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 Elisp in script tags in html. Can already browse pure html in eww.

I'd rather have sxml+elisp than js

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#308

Post by bobochan »

mongol wrote: post #110

How much can Emacs change while still being Emacs? Is it worthwhile to start building a new editor on the core Emacs "idea"? Because I think minor changes will not move the needle. Someone compared it with the birth of Firefox, scrapping Netscape Mozilla Communicator or whatever it was called. I think that is what it would take but even that would be uncertain.

I have used emacs for decades so I do not see the need for a big restart, but your question does remind me of something RMS said years ago. I cannot find the exact quote, but the essence of it was that any editor that offered the programmability of emacs was worthy of the name regardless of its keybindings, etc. In that sense I do not believe there would be any problem with emacs following the model of Fortran; it can look and behave quite different, but at its core it has to be open and accessible for the user to extend and adapt.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#309

Post by agumonkey »

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 consider the article a bit absurd. Emacs is only less popular relative to the set of editors one can pick today. Emacs has never been more popular or alive. melpa, emacsrocks, famous magit/org, even emacs confs and emacs talks at lisp confs..

Plus maybe "more is less" is adequate when it comes to emacs. Too many people may create friction or waste. Let it be low and slow, it's fine, emacs has stopped sprinting, it's in a nice hike.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#310

Post by look_lookatme »

jakear wrote: post #256
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)

Awesome. Y'all do great work. I have a couple of questions if you are checking this thread:

1. Do y'all do security analysis on extensions? Static analysis etc? Specifically, I am talking about detecting potential source exfiltration type stuff.

2. Any chance you'll develop the ability to customize the editor via some personal scripts vs a plugin? I'd like to implement a command to do a specific thing (toggle between test and implementation in a rails project) but I don't want to go through the process of creating a plugin... I just want to map a shortcut to a TypeScript function. I know there is a couple of extensions that try to enable this but it would be nice to have an official path to doing these kinds of personal customizations.

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