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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#421

Post by catalogia »

snazz wrote: post #184
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) There is GUI Emacs (what you should probably use). (2) There's no better environment available for dealing with text (including notes, papers, slides, email, &c.) than Emacs. Why do you hate future programmers so much?

GUI Emacs is a very thin GUI skin on TTY Emacs. As an example someone brought up elsewhere in this thread, you can't scroll (with the mouse) in Emacs without bringing the cursor with you. Scrolling without moving the cursor doesn't make sense in a TUI environment, so it doesn't exist in the GUI version either. Your second point is very subjective and most people are bound to disagree with it. You certainly can't argu…

> Scrolling without moving the cursor doesn't make sense in a TUI environment

It makes perfect sense as soon as you realize there is no reason the cursor has to be the cursor. In curses: curs_set(0); then draw your own 'cursor' wherever you like.

Anyway, GUI emacs is way better than terminal emacs. Image support (in terminal emulators this is always an awful hack) and support for different font sizes in the same frame at once is something I'd not give up.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#422

Post by dietr1ch »

redis_mlc wrote: post #385
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.

That's true, but I'd rather use tramp-mode and keep my setup instead of sacrificing it for the sake of consistency across servers. It won't really be consistent anyways, you'll get some plugins here and there I guess.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#423

Post by rodgerd »

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…

Why would you want to become a maintainer when your suggestions will be blocked by a guy who doesn't even know what org-mode is, hasn't coded in decades, and insists the terminology has to pretend it's 1968?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#424

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #389
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…

I’m not a programmer, just a tradesman who’s worn a few different hats over the eons, but I’ve noticed something as I’ve gotten older and lazier:

I am equally as unproductive regardless of my setup.

My productivity has way more to do with all the other factors at play than it does the fine-tuning of my setup.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#425

Post by microtonal »

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 am not a passionate Emacs user and I strongly dislike the weird bugs that rear their heads sometimes. I was always a vim user, but switched to Emacs because it has better support for completion, etc. while having nearly perfect vi emulation. I would even go as far as saying that Evil is vi implemented in Emacs Lisp.

I try VS Code every now and then, but I always stop because of two reasons: incomplete vi(m) emulation and the latency feels really bad compared to Emacs/vi.

Would like to switch otherwise, but non-leaky vi support and good latency are essentials.

Edit, forgot to add: something as good and keyboard-driven as magit.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#426

Post by microtonal »

brlewis wrote: post #382
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…

> 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.

For me it is

    home-manager switch
and I don't only have my full Emacs configuration, but a full development environment with Rust, Go, etc. Though you could probably also configure VS Code that way.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#427

Post by jjoonathan »

Scarbutt wrote: post #417
jjoonathan wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You had to spend time learn a new set of keybindings for each one though, for editing and interacting with the interface.

Not really. The most common keybindings of GUI text editing have largely converged, and those that haven't collectively account for similar total complexity to, say, basic file/buffer management and movement in emacs.

Yes, the life of an editor nomad sometimes involves hitting the wrong key to build or occasionally forgetting which modifiers trigger block select, but those adjustment pains are typically overshadowed by the joys of high-priority platform integration that works straight out of the box, and they're downright tiny in comparison to the pain I used to experience getting half-assed platform support up and limping in emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#428

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

bachmeier wrote: post #391
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…

> In a few years, VS Code has achieved better out of the box functionality for working professionals than emacs has in 40 years. That's not as clever as you seem to think it is. Emacs was created for a different world. Of course new tools have an easier time in the world for which they were created and with no legacy baggage.

You’re essentially saying that emacs has been stagnant and hasn’t changed with the world around it. Yes, absolutely. That’s why it’s not a surprise it is losing popularity.

Clunkiness and baggage is not a foregone conclusion for software. Software can keep up with a changing world, discarding old baggage along the way. In the end it doesn’t matter. Whether it is old software that adapts and changes or new software that supplants stagnant, clunky software. The world uses whatever is easiest and most relevant and goes on.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#429

Post by smt88 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #389
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…

> 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.

I've been writing software for ~24 years, and I can understand the need for this in the past.

Now, I just don't get it. What are emacs users customizing so intensely that no other environment can match it?

I've found that JetBrains IDEs with a few plugins do 100% of what I want, including some really advanced refactoring and useful GUI integration with CLI hinters/linters. VS Code takes more setup, but it's similar.

The level of customization that emacs supports seems unnecessary to me. Can you talk about a few use cases where emacs is just better than an IDE could be?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#430

Post by josteink »

neutronicus wrote: post #128
josteink wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really doesn’t “get” or care for Vim, why should I contribute to an alternate Emacs-“distro” entirely focused on an existing Vi user-base, using non-standard conventions and keybindings? I mean good for them having that option, but what’s in that thing for me?

If you ever start to develop Emacs Pinkie as I did you may come around

Then I can enable evil-mode, instead of fully changing my setup to a unconventional Emacs-distro which does everything differently.

Again: what’s in it for me supporting this alternate Emacs universe?

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