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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#461

Post by dmarchand90 »

yewenjie wrote: post #451
michaelmrose wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disclaimer: mostly vim guy. I agree that Emacs is super powerful for power users, don't agree that it's intuitive or easy for new users. Also I found spacemacs to be pretty brittle when I last tried it a year ago.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#462

Post by robotwizard »

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…

What are you guys talking about...

1. nano code.txt 2. ??? 3. Profit!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#463

Post by thayne »

microtonal wrote: post #425
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) emulati…

> but switched to Emacs because it has better support for completion, etc. while having nearly perfect vi emulation

I switched to emacs for similar reasons (plus the fact that it supported embedded repls that actually worked). But eventually switched to neovim, because it could do things like completion and repls. vim 8 can now as well.

> 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.

Same. Also start-up time. I love typing `v ` in a terminal and instantly getting an editor. Lower memory usage is also nice.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#464

Post by dmarchand90 »

microtonal wrote: post #425
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) emulati…

How long did it take you to switch? I tried spacemacs for a few months but got tired after I was always accidentally breaking things

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#465

Post by pjmlp »

michaelmrose wrote: post #441
jjoonathan wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and while emacs has a reputation as being the ur-editor from which all text editing innovation stems, the reality is quite the opposite. It's stagnant and hasn't been the center of text editing innovation for at least the last decade, and probably quite a bit longer before that. It was a particularly bad string of basic package incompatibilities that woke me from my emacs evangelist phase, but it was the realiz…

Emacs is a gui app. You can have if you like a tool bar. A menu-bar, tabs, split windows. If you want something slightly more like a traditional gui emacs application framework enables bidirectional communication with QT applications running in emacs frames. Personally I use it to render HTML mail inside emacs with what amounts to embedded chrome.

As far as I am aware it still isn't as GUI oriented as ZWEI used to be.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#466

Post by kgwgk »

macintux wrote: post #278
kgwgk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that reading code from top to bottom is not a reason to need or prefer a mouse. Other people prefer using a keyboard and find moving through pages more intuitive than scrolling.

Different people have different preferences, so clearly it is a reason to prefer a mouse. I don’t use my mouse with Emacs, but I’m not going to tell someone else they’re wrong for wanting to. I’m beginning to see why people feel the Emacs community is less-than-welcoming.

Of course different people have different preferences. I don’t tell anybody that the way they prefer is wrong! I don’t say there is a reason to prefer the keyboard either. But being what it is doesn’t make Emacs broken. You can definitely read code from top to bottom on it.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#467

Post by tome »

a1369209993 wrote: post #272
korethr wrote: post #59

A shame Stallman put the kibosh on QT quickly. Is he planning on there being a GPLv4? Not in the "leaving that option open for the future" kind of planning, but more, "A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4." Because if they truly want a cross platform visual interface, AFAICT, QT is the closest you're going to get, and IMO, is the best means of doing so. Every QT app I'v…

> A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4. Software-as-a-service under GPLv3 isn't required to provide source code to remote users (AGPL acommplishes exactly nothing in this regard), so there definitely is such a need, but I don't know if RMS is actually working on that.

I thought that's exactly what AGPL was for. Is there something flawed about it?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#468

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#469

Post by tome »

fhennig wrote: post #288
dfabulich wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Can you do that for all users? The server is a per-user server, isn't it?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#470

Post by tome »

wglb wrote: post #411
dan-robertson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs itself starts fast. Most people who use emacs have a lot of packages that load on startup or autoload files that need to be read and this makes startup slow. Maybe if saving an image were easier then things would be faster but I think most serious users don’t care because they start emacs once a week

If my emacs is a slow start, it is because I have a lot of previously opened files that it reads at startup. Otherwise, it is as quick as anything.

Interesting. How did you get it to store the list of previously opened files?
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