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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#321

Post by pvg »

kick wrote: post #221
pvg wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vi has text input modality, unlike essentially, well, anything. It's an entirely different model of operation which it shares with no current software and hasn't for a quarter century. It's strange to be talking about the UI details of vi/emacs (both, by current standards, about equally super-weird) when the article itself is a kind of perfect vignette of the organizational dysfunction of the group that maintains ema…

'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; it's got a significantly-smaller barrier to entry than Emacs, and breaks fewer core-assumptions. Is that agreeable to you?

It's not. Maybe we're talking about completely different things because I'm not following this at all, just like the other responder downthread. For decades, GUI text entry has been modeless. Larry Tessler one of the GUI's pioneers and prophets (PBUH) had a 'NO MODES' license plate and the idea remains a central theme in UI design. Vi doesn't do that. It does this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Modes

I don't mean to debate the merits of this design but in terms of 'breaking core assumptions, vi 'breaks the core assumption' of typing text into a computer. It's not, per Winnfield, the same ball park, same league or even the same sport.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#322

Post by dleslie »

michaericalribo wrote: post #299
dleslie wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your editor wants to add track changes and inline comments to your manuscript draft. How do they do that in your org-mode file? https://orgmode.org/manual/Comment-Lines.html > You're writing a novel, and it has extensive research notes, background material, and miscellany you're keeping track of. https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Internal-Links.html https://orgmode.org/manual/External-…

To be clear, by "your editor", I don't mean emacs—I mean the person who works at a publisher: she knows that a gnu is just a wildebeest and inheritance bequeathal of wealth; assumes "C-c ;" is just an obscure emoji; and will not waste her time indulging a writer who uses an obscure [1], roundabout way of entering text into M$ Word. Look, again, you're preaching to the choir—I use emacs every day. But writing a Python…

I understood what you meant.

"Open my doc in notepad or any other text editor. Put comments wherever you want; if you'd be so kind as to put them on their own line with a # at the start it would save me some time."

Easy peasy.

The beauty of org is that it's just a text file. You don't need Emacs to edit it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#323

Post by bananabreakfast »

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…

Just because something is old doesn't make it not user hostile. If anything it encourages it as we are always getting better at making better interfaces.

Cars from the 70's don't have airbags. So, by comparison to what is available today, they are user hostile.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#324

Post by aidenn0 »

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 is not made up of sentient beings who have moral obligations.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#325

Post by armitron »

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

Emacs Lisp is a much better language than JavaScript, and that goes double for extending Emacs.

Emacs Lisp is the reason for Emacs being such a cohesive ecosystem. JavaScript would be a major mistake.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#326

Post by gfxgirl »

I've used emacs for maybe 18 months solid. I never found it had a single feature that my other editors didn't have (not saying it doesn't, just staying I didn't run into them).

My other editors can be extended via scripts. My other editors (mostly) have keyboard macros, repeat, etc.. My other editors can be used efficiently keyboard only. My other editors debug various languages. My other editors open shells in the editor. I don't care about org mode, I care about editing code.

Conversely many other editors do their best to be dev env aware, reading/understanding/integrating various language environment project files, which was never something I found in emacs (maybe it's all been added since I my emacs times)

About the only thing I still would consider using emacs for is editing in a shell remotely but (a) usually it's not already installed and (b) usually I'm not editing anything serious remotely.

What's special about emacs? What am I missing that's not in other editors?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#327

Post by bitwize »

state_less wrote: post #185
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, emacs in the browser. Popular editors like VS Code use monaco and now github has codespaces [1] which is running in the browser. People live as much or more in the browser as the terminal these days, so bring the emacs sauce to where the people live. Maybe you could get some of the c compiled to web assembly, and the lisp would follow? It'd be neat to open a buffer to the page emacs lives in and start editing, ca…

Emacs in the browser, you say? smug Willy Wonka face

http://www.ymacs.org/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#328

Post by Gollapalli »

wwarner wrote: post #150

I use emacs and have for a really long time. Unfortunately, I don't recommend it to anyone because I think the costs of learning it outweigh the benefits. When I read this article, I was surprised that my gripes don't overlap much with those listed in the article. I do really like the idea of "new user detection", which would take a user through a short configuration process if the .emacs file was missing. I think my…

AEMACS would be the winner for me. Asynchronous Editor Macros.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#329

Post by metroholografix »

gfxgirl wrote: post #326

I've used emacs for maybe 18 months solid. I never found it had a single feature that my other editors didn't have (not saying it doesn't, just staying I didn't run into them). My other editors can be extended via scripts. My other editors (mostly) have keyboard macros, repeat, etc.. My other editors can be used efficiently keyboard only. My other editors debug various languages. My other editors open shells in the e…

Emacs is not an editor, it is rapidly-programmable-at-runtime-evolvable software that is designed to:

+ Help you realize how _you_ best deal with information.

+ Help you manifest your realization through _rapidly_ molding Emacs into your conceived model.

It is also the closest thing we have today to the Lisp Machine paradigm. I wrote this earlier today:

  You'll get the most out of Emacs if you treat it as an 
  investment and put in the time to learn at least some Emacs 
  Lisp so that you can confidently explore and customize the 
  rest of the system. You don't need to become an expert 
  overnight, just learn enough to navigate the system (which 
  is self-documenting and geared towards helping you perform 
  that navigation).
Yes, it may feel weird or out of touch with contemporary aesthetics but that's really because it doesn't come with strong, tunnel-like notions of _how you should think_ and _how you should work_.

It is not easy today to come to terms with a tool that's simply designed to help you craft a computing experience, since we've been so conditioned to expect somebody else's model be there from the beginning:

https://xristos.sdf.org/why-emacs.txt

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#330

Post by Gollapalli »

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.

Users start noticing ~200 ms. A full second is huge.
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