Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#561

Post by adrianN » Fri, May 08, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

enitihas wrote: post #530

adrianN wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can use 40% more cores when compiling than my CLion using colleagues because vim doesn't need 10GB of RAM. I tried using CLion, but it was just too slow. Maybe I was holding it wrong.

Off-course, if majority of your time is spent compiling gigantic C++ codebases, more power to you for using VIM. CPU load in code compilation hasn't been the bottleneck I ever faced and I think this applies to most folks. Plus CLion doesn't just arbitrarily start consuming CPU, if it is not doing indexing(and VIM simply can't do the kind of indexing that CLion does), it doesn't consume much CPU. In the idle state, it…

I don't spend the majority of my time compiling (a decent chunk though!), but then again, I also don't spend a large part of my time doing the complex refactorings that an IDE would make much easier. I don't think either vim or clion has dramatic advantages over the other.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#562

Post by b3n » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

jmoss20 wrote: post #373

freddie_mercury wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into unsupportable hyperbole. Emacs is nowhere close to unprecedented in its age and not remotely close to the oldest piece of software still in existence. GNU Emacs is from 1984. It is a reimplementation of the earlier 1972 Emacs. This matters, since if you're includi…

Fair enough! But the point stands, no? I pointed out emacs' age to note how users expectations of editors have evolved over that time. Certainly there is older software -- but is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? That is the part I find unprecedented (and the part relevant to GP).

> is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape?

Yes. Microsoft Word, for example, is older than GNU Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#563

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

rataata_jr wrote: post #520

tome wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

This is better https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BookmarkPlus#Bookmark%2b as it's more general and has some other features. From experience, I'd recommend not using desktop-save.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#564

Post by throwanem » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

pantulis wrote: post #552

clarry wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Install Spacemacs. 2. Observe a flurry of errors every time you start emacs. Ignore and hope it works because no idea how to fix any of it. 3. Find, among a million others, the command that seems to do what exactly what you want. Command gives an error. Dunno how to debug. 4. Watch emacs features that should work ootb not work because spacemacs or evil or one of the three bazillion packages did something that brok…

This. While Spacemacs is an admirable effort, I think it misses the point: Emacs is an editor for power users from another era, so it requires huge effort by the user to become truly productive by todays standards. Trying to create layers upon layers of "friendlines" and eye candy is not going to solve the complexity. I've always said that it's better to grasp Emacs with a vanilla config or a small starter kit and se…

Pretty much, yeah, from what I've seen. Against the shockingly low ambient baseline of "editors that aren't Vim or Emacs", VS Code's highly usable OOTB experience and broad extension ecosystem are enough of an improvement to constitute a real win despite being so poor by comparison with a thoroughly evolved configuration of either of the Two True Editors.

I stick with Emacs because, now having invested more than a decade in learning to get the most out of it, I can do a lot of things in seconds that take VS Code users minutes or hours. But the converse is also true, and I think will only become more so. Especially in the realm of remote collaboration and mentorship, which has never been more important than it is today, VS Code does things that Emacs simply can't, and almost certainly never will.

That's fine, of course. That different tools should specialize in different things is perfectly reasonable, and I don't have the kind of emotional attachment to Emacs that would give me cause to be upset with its dwindling user share or its lack of broad appeal. It serves me very well, but it's not something I advocate, although of course I mentor those who take an interest.

I am looking at picking up VS Code, with suitably Emacs-esque keybindings, for the mentoring-in-programming aspect of my role. That's where pretty much everyone else is, or is going. And in that context, its less fluent and less extensible user interface is probably a boon, once I get over being frustrated by it. In the context of teaching someone less experienced, acting with the speed of thought is really best avoided; if you don't explain why you're doing what you're doing, or offer the chance for questions and discussion, essentially the entire point is lost.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#565

Post by agigao » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

Well, spacemacs is an awesome intro for new users, which makes it cool, useful and quickly configurable.

Tried to use Emacs for data analysis in Python, because I write lots of docs in org and client project status/tasks report page is also generated from my org file. But the problem is proper support of repl in python. We got number of packages but none really solves my problem to have a proper analytics workflow.

P.S. I also write Clojure and Emacs it surely the go-to environment! Actually, I got into Emacs due to Clojure back in 2014.

- Spacemacs for all the bells and whistles

- Emacs Prelude for simple base

- Doom Emacs is another beast, though.

P.S. What might make it much more accessible I think is builtin project structure view such as Treemacs. Also, let's not forget that Most of the world do use Windows and Emacs has a poor support for this platform.

- The problem with VSCode, Atom and alikes are just absolutely inconsistent keybindings, half-baked packages and honestly I don't really want to write code in a browser. It's like a flashy smartphone - does everything but few things well. Hence my favourite tools for coding are produced by JetBrains - PyCharm and IntelliJ. These tools do also have their keyboard inconsistency issues, but it is what it is.

Happy Hacking!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#566

Post by throwanem » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #513

didibus wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Org-babel does this, and is less limited in language choice than Jupyter; you can use any language for which a binding exists (there are many, including Python) in any code block, irrespective of what you use in any other. The interfaces are pretty clean, and you can have inline images, although I think not interactive ones. Data structures are expressible in code or in tables.

I don't use it much these days, having less need for that sort of highly interactive exploratory analysis, but I did find Jupyter highly limiting by comparison.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#567

Post by m463 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:18 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…

I think the productivity graphs look like:

  |          22
  |        22
  |  1111121111
  | 1   22
  |1  22
  |122
  -------------

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#568

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:18 AM UTC

macintux wrote: post #273

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…

Is there a reason you’re so actively hostile in this thread? You’ve been belittling people in nearly every comment. You were willing to apologize to well-known contributors, but everyone else can stuff it?

Yes and no. I need to tone it down (or leave HN, wehich is probably better).

Other people need to improve things. But this is not going to happen. An alternative to doing something is to dismiss other people's work. That's what this guy did. 'Emacs is too slow' - emacs startup time doesn't bother me, even if it did it would be down in the noise amongst other emacs irritations (or other software, heck, the amount of time I've wasted on Git...)

He dissed emacs for no good reason, and dissed stallman who I really do respect (because RMS actually did something).

I've seen a lot of this kind of destructive behaviour and I'm so tired of it. I should just leave HN if I can't contribute properly.

Edit. If I post stuff like "x != y" I will say why, with timing, or clarify with In My Experience" or something. "emacs is slower" doesn't tell me by how much or discuss if startup time even matters, so it is a useless criticism; I can't act on it. It doesn't even feel like a good-faith comment.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#569

Post by fluffything » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

subsection1h wrote: post #414

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…

"I don't care about org mode" Thanks for specifying this and confirming my observations. My experience has been that Emacs users are much more likely than users of other text editors to be researchers and other avid note-takers who do care about tools like Org mode. For example, I have a personal knowledge base that includes several thousand Org files containing my notes. It's not a coincidence that the creator of Or…

I'm a researcher, and I have a git repository for my notes, which I edit using markdown. It supports latex math, tables, cross links, labels, and html if I need to do anything fancy, like inserting images, videos, etc. (youtube embedded video? no problem). I can edit them from any device, and they get sync'ed everywhere via git.

I can also read them from everywhere, and markdown renders super nicely.

I take markdown over org-mode everyday. I used to use org-mode 15 years ago, but today that's pointless for me.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#570

Post by alfiedotwtf » Fri, May 08, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

Reelin wrote: post #453

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…

> 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 S…

A +1 here for your comment...

I have multiple machines, running Docker, running multiple tux sessions, for different projects. I can’t even begin to think how I’d pick up where I left off when switching between projects if I wasn’t using Vim