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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#371

Post by metroholografix »

asdf123wtf wrote: post #369
metroholografix wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself, almost like a cybernetic extra sense that I can put to use as I see fit. Practically, as I go about my daily programming, if I feel something is off and could be improved, I have a pretty accurate idea of how long it'll take for me to implement it. Usually it's not that long a…

> I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself... The problem is that these days, you could use vscode or atom for a month or two, and get that same feeling. Emacs from scratch is not a great use of time anymore.

Maybe so, but the ceiling with those tools is very low. I simply can not do what I do every day with Emacs using vscode or atom. I know why you compared them, but I feel that these comparisons are meaningless. A category error.

Emacs is simply something else.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#372

Post by brlewis »

arexxbifs wrote: post #297

I'm not an Emacs user, but with all kinds of software like this, I find that the strengths lie not in what makes it popular but what makes it lasting. If too much is changed in Emacs, scores of users will cry havoc and switch to XEmacs (or something) and it will become even less popular. Emacs has a stable core user base and as far as I can tell, it's recently getting some traction among a new generation who are exac…

> it's recently getting some traction among a new generation

Where can I learn more about this? If I teach my kids emacs will they not be the only ones among their peers who use it?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#373

Post by jmoss20 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #301
jmoss20 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 includi…

Fair enough! But the point stands, no?

I pointed out emacs' age to note how users expectations of editors have evolved over that time. Certainly there is older software -- but is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? That is the part I find unprecedented (and the part relevant to GP).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#374

Post by asdf123wtf »

metroholografix wrote: post #371
asdf123wtf wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using and programming Emacs for ~12 years. After all this time, I am at the level where it really feels like an extension of myself... The problem is that these days, you could use vscode or atom for a month or two, and get that same feeling. Emacs from scratch is not a great use of time anymore.

Maybe so, but the ceiling with those tools is very low. I simply can not do what I do every day with Emacs using vscode or atom. I know why you compared them, but I feel that these comparisons are meaningless. A category error. Emacs is simply something else.

What are some examples? I'd say the ceiling is marginally lower (maybe) than emacs, but the learning curve to extend is orders of magnitude more approachable.

And I'm not sure the ceiling is actually lower.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#375

Post by empthought »

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.

Stallman hasn't been in charge of Emacs for over a decade.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#376

Post by brlewis »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #120

This is a super dumb example, but I hate that scrolling is tied to cursor. Like if I'm gasp using the mouse to scroll through a file in emacs, the cursor has to stay in the viewport. If I scroll past the viewport, the cursor moves to the viewport. In IntelliJ (which has such good emacs keybindings I can use it for a lot of my work), the opposite is true: when I scroll away from my cursor, it stays there and when I st…

Whenever I want to keep my place but look at another part of the file, I do C-x 2, mess around in the other window, then C-x 0 when I want to go back to my place.

I hate that in other editors if I'm keeping the cursor in one place and scrolling to look at another, that if I want to change something in that other place I have to lose the cursor position I'm trying to hold onto.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#377

Post by MarcScott »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #366

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

> The fact that everyone has to have a non-empty, non trivial .emacs file means it is maximally unsuitable - for everyone.

The fact that I have a non trivial .emacs file ensures that when I switch machines, I only have to transfer a single file to enable an identical development environment.

I can't speak for VS Code, as I've only ever played with it a couple of times, but can I do the same thing there? I don't want to spend hours finding and installing packages to recreate my dev environment, or play with various GUI settings to recreate my preferred theme. With Emacs, I can `package-install-selected-packages` on a new build, and I'm using an exact clone of my usual config.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#378

Post by stewbrew »

01100011 wrote: post #360
galoisscobi wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might want to update your vim installation and check out `:help terminal`.

One thing I learned last year is to keep all my notes in markdown. I don't like it, I prefer my own markup, but many apps support it, which increases its usefulness a lot.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#379

Post by metroholografix »

asdf123wtf wrote: post #374
metroholografix wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, but the ceiling with those tools is very low. I simply can not do what I do every day with Emacs using vscode or atom. I know why you compared them, but I feel that these comparisons are meaningless. A category error. Emacs is simply something else.

What are some examples? I'd say the ceiling is marginally lower (maybe) than emacs, but the learning curve to extend is orders of magnitude more approachable. And I'm not sure the ceiling is actually lower.

Almost everything I do on the computer happens inside Emacs, using programs written in Emacs Lisp:

Writing code, reading/sending email across ~30 email accounts spread out over different services, reading newsgroups, mailing lists and RSS feeds, maintaining a presence in 7 different IRC servers with ~30 channels total, using a variety of connection methods, watching and filtering certain twitter feeds, controlling external applications through Apple Events [1], file management local and remote, remote system management, local virtual machine management, note taking, calendar, agenda, notifications, bookmarks for external applications (Chrome and Preview), password manager, version control, music playing.

I can keep going. The only programs besides the OS and Emacs I use on a regular basis are Google Chrome, Preview.app, VMWare, Calibre, mpv, bash/ssh, Unix command line tools (less and less) and my bittorrent client written in Common Lisp.

I've almost finished an Emacs Lisp controller for Chrome, allowing me to bring a lot of information (e.g. tabs) into Emacs in order to rapidly manage it on my terms. I've done the same for Preview.app. I treat it as a dumb vessel that does the rendering. The actual information (filename, metadata, current page, date etc) is extracted from it, stored and manipulated in Emacs. That way I don't rely on Apple to dictate how I'm allowed to use my computer. I can experiment with different paradigms and find the one that fits me best. Emacs is the magic that makes all of that happen.

[1] https://github.com/atomontage/osa

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#380

Post by willberman »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #366

New employee 1 workflow at company X: 1. Install VS Code 2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin 3. Work New employee 2 workflow at company X: 1. Install emacs 2. Try to install some source code indexing tool 3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies. 4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documenta…

Workflow on midsized personal project with editor that I'm comfortable with and have customized over the majority of time I've been programming: work.

Look, obviously VS Code has emacs beat in the vast majority usability features. Emacs works for a lot of what I work on. For the things it doesn't work for, I use the tool that works better.

I have lots of personal qualms with emacs, but to declare it "maximally unsuitable," is overkill.

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