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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#311

Post by schwartzworld »

rglullis wrote: post #33
forrestthewoods wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.

Emacs' notation for keybindings uses C for indicating the Ctrl/Cmd key and M for the Meta (alt). Things like C-c C-v are chords. and . I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.

That's to avoid overstretching your pinky

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#312

Post by masoudd »

buzzkillington wrote: post #287
blihp wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's when we fork emacs with the GPL license. You can't retroactively change the license to the code you published as GPL before

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#313

Post by chewxy »

acomar wrote: post #255
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.

I found lsp-mode to be quite cool (recently reformatted my machine, and so decided to modernize). lsp-ui + company mode kills the input latency on any 4k display on Ubuntu tho. Input latency is now VS-Code/Atom level slow. Unbearable. Even with delay set to 0

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#314

Post by mrwebmaster »

It would be cool to have package statistics to know which packages are more popular/used. The community is too fragmented at this moment, and there are too many competing packages. While it's good to have diversity, having package statistics will make it easier to choose the best packages for end-users and package developers will focus on improving the most used packages. It will also improve compatibility between packages.

Or is this already implemented? VS Code does it and it's a good feature.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#315

Post by spindle »

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…

That's so well stated, /u/agentuitra. Thank you.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#316

Post by rglullis »

jrimbault wrote: post #234
rglullis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, chill. There are lots of things that seem daunting at first and unforgiving to the impatient beginner: chess, surfing, martial arts, drawing... it doesn't mean that any of those are user-hostile, it just means that those that want to learn and master it will need to develop a certain discipline. If you don't want that, fine. But what is the point of going around and saying that those who do enjoy these things ar…

I did not say they are stupid. I'm saying some communities build on pseudo-elitism. It's not stupid to enjoy using a text editor. It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it". I think the expirement is over and conclusions can be drawn : emacs represent a tiny proportion of text editor's users, not because of a lack of features (is there's one thing missing it w…

> It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it".

It is also a bad misrepresentation of the point made by the person that you originally quoted.

Let me try an analogy: emacs is Olympic-sized pool, 50m long, 5m deep, with a 10m jump platform. It has been in use for decades by all kinds of people. Some new people see some amazing swimmers and divers using that pool and want to join. Problem is, they also don't know how to dive and are still learning to swim so they ask for a nice ladder on the corner and they want the pool to have one end shallow enough for people to stand on.

The developer is basically saying: yeah, getting in there is intimidating at first and we can do some improvements to help beginners, but we also need to find a way to get those beginners to get into the training program, train harder and dedicate themselves to diving, otherwise it would just be a waste of time and resources. Oh, and we also need to keep in mind that none of these changes should affect the people that are already training here for years.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#317

Post by catalogia »

dfabulich wrote: post #220
catalogia wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching from vim to emacs was a virtually seamless experience and a complete no-brainer... yet I put it off for years. Years before I finally took the plunge, I knew I eventually would. Vimscript is awful and although elisp isn't a great lisp dialect, it doesn't have to be great to be better than vimscript (which is abominable.) I shouldn't have put off the switch for so long. In retrospect I'm not even sure why I…

You put off learning Emacs partly because you learned Vim first. But why did you learn Vim first? Because people around you were already using Vim. Because Vim came preinstalled. Because Vim was quicker and easier to just edit a file. Startup performance isn't about persuading fence sitters. It's about becoming the default, the option people pick without even knowing why they picked it.

In truth when I was a teenager I sat down with vim and emacs one afternoon and tried both. At the end of that day I chose vim, because I preferred the default bindings of vim. Nobody around me used either, nobody around me programmed at all, but I had read online that the pros used or or the other.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#319

Post by microcolonel »

catblast wrote: post #294
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…

You’re being an idiot. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mo... C is an abbreviation for . You can map pretty much any key to any other key, that’s neither here nor there. M is for meta, s is for super, S is for shift, A is for alt, H is for hyper. My control key is mapped at the window manager and terminal level. As far as emacs is concerned it’s control. If I map my R key to emit a control ke…

> M is for meta, s is for super, S is for shift, A is for alt, H is for hyper.

But if we're going down that road, M is for alt really, and super wasn't always what Xf86 says it is (the windows/command key).

The mapping of keys is arbitrary, but the bindings to the symbols are documented and many defaults exist.

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