Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#451

Post by yewenjie » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:54 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #431

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…

New employee 3 workflow at company X: 1. Install Emacs 2. Sync existing config via git 3. Work New employee 4 workflow at company X: 1. Install Emacs 2. Spend 2 hours learning default Emacs 3. Work New employee 5 workflow at company X: 1. Install Emacs 2. Spend 1 - 2 hours learning default Emacs 3. Spend 2 - 4 hours googling interesting Emacs packages, in each case going to their GitHub repo to read the directions, a…

I second this so much. Emacs configs like Spacemacs, Doom, or M-Emacs provide an excellent out-of-the box experience.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#452

Post by tome » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:55 AM UTC

kevindong wrote: post #350

olivierestsage wrote: post #101

I hear a lot about the declining popularity of Emacs, but I always wonder how much it is overstating the case. As a tech enthusiast but (mostly) non-programmer, my perception has actually been that the "cool factor" of Emacs has been on the rise. Around 2011 or so, I hardly ever saw mention of it online. Now a day hardly go by on places like Reddit's "unixporn" board that someone doesn't post their slick setup with E…

> I hear a lot about the declining popularity of Emacs, but I always wonder how much it is overstating the case. Google Trends certainly reports that emacs has experienced a dramatic decline in popularity since 2004. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs

The Internet has experienced a similar dramatic decline in popularity.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=emacs,in...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#453

Post by Reelin » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #429

quadrifoliate wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

> Can you talk about a few use cases where emacs is just better than an IDE could be?

I don't use Emacs at present (Neovim instead), but I find TTY based programs to be genuinely more productive and flexible once you make it past the initial learning curve. Using tmux and ssh to seamlessly float between devices with an ongoing complex editing session immediately comes to mind. I've also used both Eclipse and Visual Studio at different times and distinctly recall what I can only describe as lumbering startup times. Ranger via ssh is often much more straightforward to use (for basic operations and browsing) than trying to click through a bunch of menus and sort out network mounting issues.

Neovim does lack advanced refactoring tools out of the box, and I've never gone looking so I can't comment. I suspect Language Server Protocol may change that in the near future though.

Regarding the possibilities afforded by the sheer level of customization, vim-fugitive comes to mind though I'm sure there are better examples. (https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#454

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

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…

Younger self used to Borland and Microsoft IDEs, when going into Xenix, DG/UX and frieds, "where is my IDE?!?".

The TA on my 2nd year university pissed off with everyone of us using Emacs as Notepad, instead of spending one hour talking about Pascal, decided to teach us how to use Emacs properly.

I was one of the few that kept with it, although I ended up moving into XEmacs, which had a much better experience.

The large majority of my fellow students decided to adopt Joe, JED instead.

After university and after a couple of years on the job market eventually all of us moved back into IDE land.

So not sure what Emacs can really do to still cater to younger generations, if even for us it was seen as something to endure on university computer systems, back when options were quite limited.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#455

Post by arsdragonfly » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

The most unfixable UI problem for Emacs is that its rendering model works upon "character cells and cursor positions, not pixels."[1] No amount of effort would steer Emacs's UI away from an ortholinear matrix of characters. Whenever you install an LSP plugin on Emacs, you'll realize how badly it hurts readability and your eyes. [1]https://m.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smoot...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#456

Post by thayne » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

> Terminal-based Vim is not like a modern application, yet is more popular than Emacs.

As someone who has started out with vim, spent a couple years using emacs (with evil-mode) and ended up with vim (more accurately neovim) again, here's my take on why this is.

First of all, I ssh into a lot of systems that have vi(m) installed, but not emacs. So, if I am using vi bindings for my main editor, I don't have to switch to using completely different editor bindings on remote systems. For other's that are in a similar situation, that's also an incentive to learn vi over emacs.

Secondly, while vi(m)'s modal editing is difficult to master , once mastered, it is, IMO, amazing. Emacs otoh just has unfamiliar, and sometimes unergonomic key bindings. While many editors do have "vim modes", I have ultimately been unhapy with most of the one's I've tried (evil mode for emacs is ironically one of the best).

Finally, there is the configuration. Both emacs and vim are extremely customizable. While VimL is certainly not the greatest language, it is at least fairly familiar to programmers with experience with ALGOL-family languages. It's also somewhat straightforward to write plugins for vim in other languages, such as python and lua. Emacs otoh, uses Emacs Lisp. And while I admire lisp, it is certainly very unfamiliar to many potential emacs users, and can often be much more verbose, especially for setting custom key bindings.

With all that said, there are things I miss about emacs. Probably the biggest is that several modes let me customize how auto-indentation worked. In vim, the ability to customize that easily is not very common, and when it does exist is not well documented.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#457

Post by smt88 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

wglb wrote: post #387

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

> magit

Lots of editors have git plugins. The question is, what can you do with magit that you can't do with those?

> slime

This is a pretty niche need, but sure. I would agree that people writing most Lisps (excluding Clojure) are better off using something like Emacs.

> Org mode

The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me reminders, and can be shared with coworkers when necessary.

I've recently been using ClickUp, and it's been fantastic. I can run it in a window next to my editor. I'm not sure what the setup is missing that Org mode doesn't deliver, but I do know that Org mode is missing a lot that ClickUp gives me.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#458

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

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.

In most jobs I worked for, taking files home from employer computers would be stealing from security point of view no matter what their contents are.

So it means that one has to create those configurations from scratch every single time in each new job.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#459

Post by michaelmrose » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:04 AM UTC

stereolambda wrote: post #224

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…

As a vim user, I use Spacemacs for Lisp. Otherwise, I don't like mode inconsistencies (e.g. vim keys don't work inside SLIME debugger), the lack of tabs and the startup/running footprint. It doesn't feel right or convenient to have many Emacs instances scattered throughout tmux or terminal windows, created and killed as needed. Now that I'm thinking about it, this and tabs help me map my work space mentally in a way…

Although there have been several tab addons for emacs for a while emacs now has native tabs that work the same as vim tabs.

You can run emacs --daemon at login and run either emacsclient to start a new window connected to an existing instance. In my measurements starting vim in a new xterm takes about 250 ms. Starting a new gui emacslient requires only 500 ms. Perhaps numerously running a new default emacs instance with emacs -Q is actually faster at 400ms.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#460

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #424

quadrifoliate wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]