Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#471

Post by _pmf_ » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:16 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…

> In a few years, VS Code has achieved better out of the box functionality

How many years will it take until stock vscode stops lagging randomly every 10 key strokes?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#472

Post by sinkasapa » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

It seems that if vim is so much more popular than emacs, old fashionedness doesn't necessarily make an editor less popular.

If one believes that emacs would be more popular if it were more like some other editor that is more popular then being more like vim would make emacs more popular. Evil has existed for a long time but vim is still more popular. As much as emacs can be like vim, people still feel vim is better at being vim.

If emacs was more like VS code, would people want to use it for that reason? It seems like VS Code would always be better at being like VS Code than emacs.

Emacs has a loyal following, conceivably of millions of users? It also attracts new users who like things about it. There are packages for most languages, even very obscure ones. Being less popular than vim doesn't seem to make emacs less useful or keep new people from picking it up. It seems like emacs is a good thing according to many people as is and if its developers want to make users happy, looking at what people use emacs for and making it do that better would probably be a good idea. Making it more like other things that already exist doesn't make as much sense to me really.

I guess I don't really understand why it is important to be most popular as long as something is useful with a strong user and developer base.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#473

Post by hvasilev » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

I've spend 4 years mastering vim and I can definitely say I could have spent that time better elsewhere. I'm pretty sure Emacs would be the same waste of my time. These editors have a very steep learning curves and require a lot of effort to master.

Don't buy into the meme, at the end of the day they are just text editors.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#474

Post by arexxbifs » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #372

arexxbifs wrote: post #297

I'm not an Emacs user, but with all kinds of software like this, I find that the strengths lie not in what makes it popular but what makes it lasting. If too much is changed in Emacs, scores of users will cry havoc and switch to XEmacs (or something) and it will become even less popular. Emacs has a stable core user base and as far as I can tell, it's recently getting some traction among a new generation who are exac…

> it's recently getting some traction among a new generation Where can I learn more about this? If I teach my kids emacs will they not be the only ones among their peers who use it?

As someone else pointed out elsewhere in this thread, check out /r/unixporn. Kids today with their tiling wm:s and esoteric editors, eh?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#475

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #468

smt88 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

[deleted]

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#476

Post by mouldysammich » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

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…

I think they dont use QT because they already have native windows, mac, X11 and GTK ports, why would they use qt?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#477

Post by tome » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #140

dfabulich wrote: post #99

Emacs might never catch up to Visual Studio Code, which is actively funded by Microsoft, but intuitively, it seems like Emacs ought to be able to catch up to Vim. It's always been weird writing Emacs extensions in ELisp, but it's not like Vimscript is a top-tier language. Emacs is hard to learn, but so's Vim. I think it comes down to performance, especially startup time. Emacs developers have never cared much about i…

And no actual timings eh? My emacs starts up within 3 seconds. 2 seconds of that is it reopening all the files from my last session and arranging them on screen, saving me quite a few more seconds of doing it manually. > my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time You have some weird priorities > Stallman is too far out of touch ... but even with active users of Emacs FUD! He monitors the emacs bugs list. Also I…

> reopening all the files from my last session and arranging them on screen,

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

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#478

Post by SkyMarshal » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:24 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…

Don't forget:

New employee 6 workflow at company X:

1. Install Spacemacs, don't bother fiddling with the config

2. Spend a few hours working through the tutorial or reviewing the excellent docs [1]

3. Work. Become a better developer [2].

[1]:https://www.spacemacs.org/doc/DOCUMENTATION.html

[2]:https://blog.osteele.com/2004/11/ides

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#479

Post by geowwy » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:27 AM UTC

hvasilev wrote: post #473

I've spend 4 years mastering vim and I can definitely say I could have spent that time better elsewhere. I'm pretty sure Emacs would be the same waste of my time. These editors have a very steep learning curves and require a lot of effort to master. Don't buy into the meme, at the end of the day they are just text editors.

It took me maybe a few hours to learn vim and I could be decently productive in it. After that I just learnt through exploration.

For me it was definitely worthwhile. Vim is almost everywhere so I can easily edit text wherever I go.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#480

Post by KitDuncan » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

loosetypes wrote: post #341

Maybe not the appropriate forum but does anyone have a sane setup for the insane javascript setup of modern times? I love emacs and am willing to put the time into tooling and configuration. But despite several hopeful attempts, I’ve been unable to manage anything comparable to vscode for this environment. That is, support for all versions of ecmascript, but also jsx, typescript, et al.

Sorry I don't use emacs, but Vim/Neovim is pretty easy to setup with coc and all it's subextensions for stuff like eslint, tailwind, vue and whatever. It's essentially just the VSCode language server running in Vim and it's awesome.