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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#401

Post by dhosek »

jimhefferon wrote: post #90
dhosek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting started with Emacs and having basic skills (load, save, cut, copy, paste, search) is WAY faster than with vi. I don't use more than a tiny fraction of emacs's capabilities and likely never will, but the initial part of the learning curve is way easier than it is with something like vi.

But emacs is not against vi. When I taught a class where I started by introducing emacs, the first question I got was how to make it have this color text and that hentai page background.

I generally use aquamacs when I need emacs these days (especially since Catalina no longer includes the terminal-based emacs by default). It offers a lot of customizations through menus for the appearance, not to mention that it supports standard cmd-whatever shortcuts for the basic functionality.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#402

Post by metroholografix »

asdf123wtf wrote: post #386
metroholografix wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Emacs main competition in the noumenal realm of ideas wasn't vim, but the commercial Lisp Machines mainly Symbolics. They were superior but technical superiority doesn't mean much in the domain of "Worse is Better" [1].

I didn't write all of the Emacs Lisp programs I mentioned, but I did go through most of them, changing the way they work to fit how I wanted to use them. This was an iterative process that is still ongoing.

What should impress you is not the breadth, but the paradigm itself as expressed in Lisp. You can probably write an IRC client in JavaScript and have it in VSCode. But that's not what I'm talking about. We're not ticking boxes down a feature list here to say "JavaScript can do that!". We're talking about a paradigm, and specifically about interactive development with a short feedback loop through Lisp which is "a difference that makes a difference" [2]. But in order to truly understand this, you have to go through the process. Philosophical truths can not be transmitted like pieces of eight.

[1] https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

[2] http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/b...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#403

Post by Alex63 »

Osiris wrote: post #392
MarcScott wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not familiar with emacs. Does that mean that you don't need to install any supporting software like indexers, linters, syntax highlighters, etc? Does the emacs file contain all that or tell it how to download all the plugins? If you could just copy one file and get all that, that's pretty cool.

The 'one file' installs the other tools for you. At least mine does. I move between machines regularly, and when I do I just install emacs according to the recommended method for the particular OS and copy my init.el file to the new machine. All the packages I depend on are installed the first time I run emacs. And my init.el would be considered pretty basic by the standards of an advanced user.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#404

Post by wglb »

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 think Emacs has been user-hostile

I don't agree. It requires a bit of learning if you are used to something else.

>I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer

This isn't true. Try, instead "I put some effort into learning it, and you can too."

Deeper understanding leads to higher productivity.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#405

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

Osiris wrote: post #392
MarcScott wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not familiar with emacs. Does that mean that you don't need to install any supporting software like indexers, linters, syntax highlighters, etc? Does the emacs file contain all that or tell it how to download all the plugins? If you could just copy one file and get all that, that's pretty cool.

No. It doesn’t. You still need to install and configure plenty of 3rd party packages and tools that are completely outside of emacs. For C++, things like cscope, ctags (or maybe etags or gtags), clang autocomplete tooling, etc.

These, their dependencies and layouts, typically change from machine to machine, OS to OS, distribution to distribution and version to version. So placing it in your emacs config isn’t really portable.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#406

Post by jjoonathan »

voidfunc wrote: post #396
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 would expect an experienced emacs user to have a config already that more or less "works". Was this a junior developer that just decided to start using emacs one day? I'm not an emacs person myself, but every emacs person I have ever met already has it setup and customized and just brings their config. A new dev starting with emacs on a new job... just sounds like a bad recipe and misunderstood priorities.

> already has it setup and customized and just brings their config

You might not have seen it happen, but if my experience was any indication, they spent a lot of time crafting that config file.

I've spent less total time configuring TextMate, Sublime, IntelliJ, Atom, Jupyter, VS Code, and PyCharm than I spent back in the day trying to learn emacs lisp and get the emacs plugins for ObjC syntax highlighting and fuzzy filename matching to play nicely with each other. Meanwhile, each of those GUI editors brought considerably more impactful unique day-to-day functionality to the table than emacs ever did.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#407

Post by ahupp »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #388
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!

Kind of. I haven't found a VSCode emacs package that does more than superficially handle emacs keybindings; there's always mismatches that trip me up.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#408

Post by catalogia »

dfabulich wrote: post #332
fhennig wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That means startup performance. Or the server/client setup could just be the default and the server starts at system boot.

Linux distros aren't going to install an Emacs daemon by default.

Last I checked, they don't have full installs of vim either. So either way you're going to be installing a package (which is hardly a great ordeal...)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#409

Post by mplanchard »

01100011 wrote: post #335
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…

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’m also a long time vim user. I basically cannot edit text without vim keybindings these days.

A few weeks back I decided to give emacs a third try, after installing it once a while ago and giving up, installing it again with spacemacs a bit later and giving up when I couldn’t figure out what layer of that behemoth errors were coming from or how to fix them.

Anyway, I finally decided to give it another shot with vanilla, with the first thing to do being to get evil mode working (which is vim keybindings). Getting to that point was a struggle, honestly. I felt handicapped without vim bindings, and I ran into some errors downloading packages after I added MELPA to my .emacs file. After an hour or two, I managed to get evil mode going, and I guess just the little bit of familiarity in what was otherwise a VERY overwhelming and unfamiliar experience made everything feel much easier.

Getting to where it was easy to install and see the effects of new plugins one at a time rather than getting the massive overload of spacemacs was super helpful. It made the learning curve smoother for sure.

I mostly did all of this because I wanted to try org mode, and honestly that has been amazing. It’s a very very good way of taking notes and tracking tasks. I’ll probably spend some time next time I’m feeling like tinkering trying to get it more like an IDE, but for now I’m happy just with org mode.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#410

Post by catalogia »

rb808 wrote: post #293
raverbashing wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim might be hard, but besides jokes about "how to quit it", it makes much more sense than Emacs. Emacs key combinations are weird. Discoverability is low. Even Vim will now tell you how to quit if you Ctrl-C it. Meanwhile I have opened Emacs and I'm trying to quit it (spoiler: Ctrl-x Ctrl-c). Some things are actually interesting and it tries to help at first but then it goes back quickly into emacs-babble that doesn…

vim sucks too but its ubiquitous from smallest container build to IoT device.

You're confusing vim with vi. On an IoT device I'd expect to find busybox's vi implementation. Definitely not vim. Ditto for containers, either a vi implementation instead of vim, or "vim-minimal" at the most. Not a full vim install.
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