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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#511

Post by _peeley »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #478
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…

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

I cannot recommend Spacemacs enough. I was a pretty dedicated Vim user for years but grew tired of the brittle tooling and subpar extensibility and decided to give Emacs a try. My first experience with Emacs was dreadful - the default keybinds were counter-intuitive and hard to use (no, I should not have to remap my control key to caps lock just to avoid carpal tunnel), basic features were absent yet included was a web browser, mail client, etc.

A month or two later I gave Spacemacs a try, and I've been using it ever since. Not only does it have sane defaults like evil-mode for Vim emulation, but a lot of terrific packages like Magit and Org-mode are builtin. I also use the Spacemacs docs as my first resort when I want to install something new or fiddle with settings, rather than the subpar GNU Emacs documentation which never quite tells me the exact information I'm looking for.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#512

Post by tome »

_peeley wrote: post #500
dmortin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days you can just google to get answers quickly, just like for any other tool. Stackoverflow, etc. has tons of content for emacs too.

It's ridiculous that end users should rely on third parties for reliable documentation. For any other tool, if you wanted to know this kind of builtin functionality it'd be readily accessible in --help, the man page, or first-party online docs. Why should Emacs be an exception?

What tool do you go to the official docs for first and only Google second? I Google everything first. Am I missing out?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#513

Post by pjmlp »

didibus wrote: post #504
pjmlp wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically think of using Emacs like a Jupyter Netbook, including the visualizations. Back when I was still into Emacs (2004) this wasn't possible.

That's possible now, you can render images inside buffers.

Render images alone is too basic, that was already possible in XEmacs.

I really meant like Jupyter Notebooks, interactive images and data structures, that you can click on and change to your pleasure and plug into Elisp code to be called back.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#514

Post by rataata_jr »

raverbashing wrote: post #163
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…

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…

Discoverability shoots up really higher than Vim or any tool when you use helm's M-x.

Also there is documentaion for literally all the key bindings and all the functions. You can access the code for all the functions. Emacs is much more user friendly than Vim.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#515

Post by microtonal »

sterlind wrote: post #485
microtonal wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nix support for VS Code is pretty painful. Only a tiny subset of extensions are listed in nixpkgs, and those are often broken (e.g. Python) when old binary versions are pulled from the CDN. If somebody could make a VS code extension that seamlessly pulls down other extensions by altering the nix config, it'd be perfect.

Thanks for the information! I haven't tried configuring VS Code through Nix yet. I guess I'll wait a while before doing another attempt.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#516

Post by dmortin »

tome wrote: post #512
_peeley wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous that end users should rely on third parties for reliable documentation. For any other tool, if you wanted to know this kind of builtin functionality it'd be readily accessible in --help, the man page, or first-party online docs. Why should Emacs be an exception?

What tool do you go to the official docs for first and only Google second? I Google everything first. Am I missing out?

Agreed. There is no point in searching the docs if google takes me to the right place instantly. It's just more efficient.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#517

Post by chrischen »

The which-key feature (whos you key bindings by pressing the first key) of doom and spacemacs is great for discoverability but would be infinitely better if they also had a key binding instant search.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#518

Post by tome »

DonHopkins wrote: post #167

From: rms@AI.MIT.EDU In general, the way for a problem to be fixed is for someone who knows how to fix it right simply to do so. Any solution that involves discussion should be avoided except as a last resort, because it is inefficient.

Is this a real email? Do you have a reference? Google didn't turn anything up.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#519

Post by shultays »

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 think most emacs user are overestimating the gain they are having by mastering art of emacs. Sure, it sounds useful to copy every 5th character in all lines that fits a certain regular expression but how many times you actually need it on your active development time and how much time you lose by doing that manually or using more traditional tools?

The coding is mostly typing and debugging. Visual studio (most ides really) is good enough at that. And to be honest emacs/vim complicates the typing part.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#520

Post by rataata_jr »

tome wrote: post #477
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Sa...
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