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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#381

Post by jmoss20 »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #323
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…

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.

Hm. I take your point, but I'm not sure the analogy works.

Maybe better: "Old" (pick a date) cars had a manual transmission. Compared to automatic transmissions, you might consider that user hostile. But back then no one knew what they were missing and got along just fine.

Nowadays, some people still like manual transmissions! Not everyone, but some folks still buy them. Some even claim they're better than automatics! "They're cheaper, easier to maintain!" Are they user-hostile? I guess it depends on who the user is.

(Airbags seem like a strict improvement, sure. But part of that comes from them not being part of the "interface" of the car -- we don't interact with them, we don't form preferences about them, gain familiarity with them, etc. Perhaps they correspond better to multi-cored CPUs, multithreading, or high-res color displays (features emacs has kept with the times on, more or less). It's much harder to come up with similar strict improvements in the UI world.)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#382

Post by brlewis »

MarcScott wrote: post #377
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…

> 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 just want to pull this particular sentence out for emphasis in case anyone is reading the "New employee 2 workflow at company X" comment and thinking that it's even the least bit true.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#383

Post by ch1lang0 »

Emacs is not an editor, is a personal travel to find and build your ultimate editor through the years, a solution that will work forever but only for you.

Yes, is the most powerful tool that ever existed, a beautiful monstrosity, no other editor will let you cherry-picking git commits, handle your agenda, export to PDF, measure the time for a cup of tea and estimate the new project costs. In some point Emacs becomes a part of yourself. Yes it will be loved and tamed only for us, the weirdos, and that is ok.

In 1996 all my friends were asking me why I installed and struggled so many hours with that thing called Linux, when Windows was so easy. "Nobody uses Linux", they told me. Well, Linux made me very good with DevOps tasks, and I finally learned what software is about when I discovered eLisp.

As many other things in this world, Emacs is not for all people.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#384

Post by stewbrew »

chongli wrote: post #190
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…

Vim and Emacs have too many philosophical differences for this to work. For example, emacs doesn't have a fixed concept of what a paragraph should be. Instead, it leaves that up to the major mode. This is fundamentally incompatible with vim's paragraph motions which are determined by empty lines and remain the same regardless of file type. As a very long-time Vim user, I prefer that my editing commands be predictable…

VIM has a text object called block that IIRC differs from filetype to filetype. I never tried but I guess you could also overwrite the ip and ap text objects for certain filetypes if you really wanted to.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#385

Post by redis_mlc »

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…

I use vi.

Never had to install anything across thousands of servers.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#386

Post by asdf123wtf »

metroholografix wrote: post #379
asdf123wtf wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

That speaks to the general breadth of the emacs extension/package ecosystem, which is impressive (but somehow not as impressive as you'd like), but how many of these things did you engineer yourself? And how many these things could not be implemented in modern editors? I'm not sure any couldn't be. Most already are.

Extensibility was emacs' killer feature when its main competition was vim and vimscript - that's just not the situation anymore.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#387

Post by wglb »

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…

Have you used magit? How about slime? Org mode? Other editors don’t have those

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#388

Post by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 »

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…

Better yet, install vscode, then install either the vim or emacs plugin. The best of all worlds!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#389

Post by quadrifoliate »

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…

This view is obviously biased against Emacs, but I don't disagree completely with the premise.

As an Emacs user, being "immediately productive" (whatever that means) is not your topmost priority. You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. As your job evolves and changes, you maintain and grow your Emacs files over decades, and borrow from someone else's workflows. In a a much better way than I can put it, Emacs users are like Igors [1]. You can be a productive individual contributor writing Clojure inside Emacs, or a productive CEO managing todos in org-mode [2] – it works equally well once you figure out how you mold your editor. VSCode "plugins" and Emacs packages are just not the same, with Emacs you can be far more flexible about changing the behavior of the plugin in specific modes or activating things given specific conditions. You revel in the effectiveness of using one of the last remaining vestiges of the Lisp Machines of Old Valyria.

Meanwhile company X will just slot in cookie cutter developer 1 and ask them to use VSCode because they are eager to get the developer to be "productive" on Day 1 for some reason. You would think that giving an employee a week for setting up and tuning their workflow should be totally normal if you want them be there for several years and be maximally productive over time. More power to them I guess.

[1] https://chrisdone.com/posts/emacs-users-are-like-igor/

[2] https://www.fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html

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