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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#351

Post by recursive »

superbaconman wrote: post #84
jwdunne wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, I moved from Emacs to VS Code about a year ago. I’d used Emacs for years but I was spending a large amount of time fixing package upgrade problems. I guess I’d got into some kind of dependency hell. Maybe I wasn’t experienced enough with Emacs to use it professionally. But that’s the kicker, I haven’t had that problem switching to VS Code. Having all of Elisp and all of Emacs available, including packages, i…

What did you do about key bindings? The default vscode ones rely heavily on arrow keys, but those things are just so far away from the home key. I can't seem to find a move up/down paragraph shortcut to map either. I've tried some of the emacs plugins but they all introduce weird behavior; I keep ending up in some random menu vs just moving my cursor around.

In what keyboard layout is home far from the arrows? I never noticed a problem with a 101/104 key layout

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#352

Post by eadmund »

snazz wrote: post #37

I think that the Emacs concept is really good, but it clearly has a lot of problems that make it altogether unattractive to new potential users. - The keybindings are not the standard CUA ones. Even with Cua Mode, every page on the internet still suggests using the regular old Emacs keybindings. There's weird conflicts between some packages, especially if you use non-default keybinds like Evil. The defaults are not e…

> Edit: I should also add that Elisp is an absolutely terrible programming language when compared to more modern alternatives.

I think it's arguably the second-best language out there, losing out only to Common Lisp. Maybe third, after TCL. I certainly wouldn't want to use JavaScript, Go or Rust to extend my editor …

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#353

Post by balloneij »

metroholografix wrote: post #329
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 investmen…

At what point does this get in the way of your programming? If there's always more to learn about the tool, I think that would bother me. I would like to like emacs, but the couple times I tried it it gets in the way because I don't know it well enough. Vim seems more appealing because there is less to know up-front, but it is still extensible

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#354

Post by Teknoman117 »

ChristianBundy wrote: post #271
Koshkin wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ensur…

It's kinda why I like the Mozilla license (MPL). Anyone can freely use (leech even) on the project, but if they make improvements or changes to the project they have to share. It also doesn't try to control how the consumer of the project is allowed to deploy such software either.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#355

Post by asdf123wtf »

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…

I dunno... I think newer editors are often easier to extend than emacs. Think atom or vscode or even sublime.

They're all extensible enough such that emacs has no real major advantage IMHO. They can be extended with mainstream languages that many programmers already know, instead of an idiosyncratic lisp with no practical application outside of emacs itself.

Emacs still has some great modes (like tramp) - but overall, I don't think its customization is really a special killer emacs feature anymore.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#356

Post by Teknoman117 »

sokoloff wrote: post #286
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?

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…

The copyright release process where I work is pretty liberal, but the amount of people I have to get involved is fairly prohibitive. If your boss doesn't like doing paperwork, you're not going to get a release...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#357

Post by EsotericAlgo »

Myrmornis wrote: post #291

I'be been using Emacs for 17 years mostly for programming-related tasks. My opinions are: - Emacs is an editor for people who think that learning some Lisp sounds fun if they don't know some already. - Emacs should not bother trying to appeal to a more general audience; it's not an editor for most people when new to programming, and it's an editor for a very small minority of non-programmers. - Emacs should focus on…

I agree that a leaner core seems intuitively right. However, the discussion on emacs-devel has been in the other direction as of late https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-04/msg01....

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#358

Post by jes »

I've been fortunate to be able to use Emacs for the last 35 years or so. If memory serves (and more and more, it doesn't) I started with Gosmacs and moved to GNU Emacs sometime around 1986 or so.

At 60 years old, I don't have the enthusiasm or the time to learn a new editor. And I'm having too much fun programming in Lisp.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#359

Post by _se »

balloneij wrote: post #353
metroholografix wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 investmen…

At what point does this get in the way of your programming? If there's always more to learn about the tool, I think that would bother me. I would like to like emacs, but the couple times I tried it it gets in the way because I don't know it well enough. Vim seems more appealing because there is less to know up-front, but it is still extensible

It doesn't get in the way at all. Once you understand what's going on, it is a huge productivity boost.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#360

Post by 01100011 »

galoisscobi wrote: post #342
01100011 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing an editor like emacs or vi is a major decision which will have long-lasting effects. I love vi, and the homerow movement keys are now hard-wired into my brain, so much so that using 'normal' applications is noticeably frustrating. Sure, I can try to add plugins to everything, but that only goes so far and requires a lot of setup work on every new computer or VM. That said, the old school editors bring plenty…

I was in your shoes about 2 weeks ago. I also learned vi first and have been using it regularly for a couple of years now but was curious about emacs. At home, I installed spacemacs which uses vi keybindings. For work due to some security stuff I went with vanilla emacs, with evil mode installed (evil also adds vi keybindings). I spent 2 evenings picking it up and getting my dot files in order. I primarily wanted to…

Thanks, I might give that a shot. I just installed vim-orgmode to see if I could get a little emacs goodness in vimland. I usually use a custom markup language and vim syntax definitions to keep track of my notes, so this may get me to convert my notes to org mode.

The thing I'm most excited about is shell-mode. For years I've wanted to be able to drop to a shell in vim and visually cut/paste the window. From what I hear, emacs can handle that.

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