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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#571

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

melq wrote: post #245
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…

I agree on the start up time point. I don't know how slow most people's experience is, and I don't use emacs, but I really can't imagine people aren't using emacs because of a few extra seconds it takes to open your code. To your second, rather obnoxious point: when they said 'out of touch', they didn't mean 'hasn't been in communication'. They meant he doesn't understand the attitudes/motivations/requirements of the…

> They meant he doesn't understand the attitudes/motivations/requirements of the community

IME the emacs devs are very considerate of requests so I have to disagree.

Edit: by contrast have you ever tried reporting a bug to microsoft? Something non-trivial. I have and it was just a wall of indifference.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#572

Post by rk06 »

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 tried spacemacs last month.

It didn't work. So I gave up.

PS: I am on windows.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#573

Post by bythckr »

I attempted to learn Emacs first, then settled into VSCode+Vim.

I even tried recently, but failed again.

So, please share some good resource for learning emacs. That is the biggest issue with trying emacs to see if it suits.

As it cannot be tried, its not considered.

Please suggest.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#574

Post by dragandj »

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

While the most practical employee 7 installs Prelude[1]:

1. Install Prelude 2. Work

[1] http://batsov.com/prelude/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#575

Post by timmy-turner »

Scarblac wrote: post #487
harrygeez wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs user here. I've been thinking about this lately since I switched to VSCode because Emacs doesn't have a good TypeScript React mode and to be honest, you're right. The difference is I can make Emacs do things just the way I want it vs can it do what I need it to do? And I find that for most part I don't miss it that much (even I'm shocked) but I still open Emacs for Magit from time to time, because there's just…

I was about to switch to VS for that reason and then I discovered Tide, which works grest as a React Typescript mode for me. But to be honest I only use Emacs because 28 years of using it has made it feel like home, I don't usually recommend it to new people.

Tide + https://github.com/jscheid/prettier.el + projectile + helm work wonders. Been using this for +3 years now and its one of the bigger productivity improvements in my recent years of emacs and programming practice.

At work, I actually try to get ppl away from Jetbrains IDEs because they are slow and their typescript and prettier support seems pretty buggy to me.

Unfortunately, most developers I meet these times are not the kind of hacker types that want to understand and optimize their tools but rather just to get stuff done on the surface (which is totally fine). So emacs isn't just a good fit for them.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#576

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

spindle wrote: post #340
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some bad stuff in emacs but to concern yourself with Meta as opposed to M- is plain silly. > if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should Yes, but it's incredibly difficult and frankly the emacs devs have enough to do (and they do it well), and UI design is a very different skillset from programming. Frankly the learning curve for emacs i…

> it's incredibly difficult Right. I see this point ignored very frequently (sometimes because it's obvious and sometimes because people are being dumb). A lot of the things that would make emacs more like other editors are extremely difficult to retrofit. I expect there is still SOME low-hanging fruit, but a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and a lot of the remaining changes that people would li…

Let's discuss that. Emacs is so flexible it should be possible to do anything. Binding cut/copy/paste functionality to the conventional keys would be trivial. A few rebound key bindings, not a problem, so you're getting at something larger; what is it?

BTW the current key bindings are so good because I can do a lot without my hands leaving the keyboard, or even moving off the home keys. That was the very point of choosing them originally AFAIK. I recall learning these new keys many years ago, it was surprisingly fast and when I'd learnt them, amazingly quick to sink into muscle memory.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#577

Post by cammil »

It seems to me that productivity is the assumed goal. But that is not the whole story. I also enjoy using Emacs. I appreciate and support its commitment to free software. I like that everything is customisable.

Also, I wonder if it would be possible to do a study on productivity between IDEs. It seems to me much of the data would be measurable. One idea would be to allow github users to state their IDE.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#578

Post by raverbashing »

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 have no idea why you would be running Emacs in a terminal in the first place.

I don't see an advantage of using it outside of the terminal in the first place to be honest.

That's the good part about vim. Or if it's complicated for you, use nano. Done. Editing of files while you're in the terminal.

And yes vimscript is annoying, but it seems to be simple enough for most of the basic stuff.

Otherwise there are plenty of GUI editors that work fine.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#579

Post by adimitrov »

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…

You can do one thing in JetBrains: edit code. That's it.

In Emacs, I read my mail, I organise my agenda, I write technical reports, blog posts, I wrote my entire thesis in org-mode. I collect research notes in Emacs, and a journal. I do my bookkeeping and accounting in Emacs. I write Confluence articles, so I don't have to deal with Confluence's shitty interface. I edit remote files, I edit files via sudo on my machine. I control git. Yes, JetBrains can do git, too. My colleagues sometimes use it. Actually, they use an unholy mix of JetBrains, GitKraken and the command line on Linux, and Tortoise, SourceTree, JetBrains and the command line on Windows. Not different people. Everybody individually! Why? Because they know how to do different things in different tools. Meanwhile, I just use magit. Magit is absolutely fantastic, there is no better git interface, and I've tried many. Even for our backend Kotlin code, which I have to use IntelliJ for, I jump back to Emacs to use git, and edit yaml/graphql/etc files.

I've probably forgotten a couple of things here. And the cool part is that Emacs now supports LSP very well, and LSP is starting to support a lot of languages very well. So I don't even miss IDE features, such as refactoring. Add to that block selection, the best undo mode, actually robust modal editing (evil!) fantastic documentation, great flexibility, keyboard macros (I use them ~2-3 a week, and they're great every time)

… the list goes on. I've been a dev for less time than you have by about 6-7 years, but I can honestly say that no other tool could even come close to replacing Emacs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#580

Post by z3phyr »

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 use emacs, and I do not have much problem with configs. I mostly work vanilla, and all the configs I needed were done when I was starting out with emacs.

Now emacs is ubiquitous to me and the last time I visited my init file was last year actually!

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