Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Emacs Popular Again

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 782 posts

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#661

Post by _bxg1 »

mbeex wrote: post #496
_bxg1 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experience varies widely by language. TypeScript support is top-notch. Clojure support used to be bad and then got good. Rust support has been bad for a long time but the nascent rust-analyzer project makes it fantastic. Python support is decent but only if you get an optional, poorly-advertised extension on top of the default one. C# support is quite solid. Etc. Only a couple of languages get first-party support…

> Python support is decent but only if you get an optional, poorly-advertised extension on top of the default one. Which one?

This one: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-pyrig...

I only found out about it by asking here on HN

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#662

Post by iimblack »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #461
yewenjie wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed on Spacemacs. Seems like a lot of stuff I had to switch to the Develop branch for it to work right. Supposedly the next release is coming out soon which will fix a lot. I’ve since switched to Doom which I like better anyways though.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#663

Post by lunias »

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 for [people who don't already know / don't want to learn emacs].

Emacs has a challenging learning curve. I don't think it's realistic to insist new employees use Emacs that haven't already chosen the path for themselves.

Real scenario (for someone experienced with and asking to use Emacs):

1. Install Emacs

2. Clone config

3. Work

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#664

Post by arexxbifs »

williamdclt wrote: post #646
arexxbifs wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code has its pros and I use it daily, but I have to spend quite a bit of time configuring a fresh install of it. Probably not as much as I would Emacs, had I used it, but it's not insignificant. And that includes changing the theme.

There's a sync extension. I think it's making it into the core functionalities.

Good news!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#665

Post by aldanor »

clarry wrote: post #543
SkyMarshal wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

If you install Spacemacs from develop branch, don't change the defaults and enable just the git plugin, it's pretty much always going to work just fine unless elpa is down or something.

I install Spacemacs in every machine for the sole reason of using Magit with vim bindings. It's so far beyond all other git clients it's even hard to explain to others sometimes. If Magit existed as a native standalone app, I would be happy to pay €50-100 for it, right away. But, but... :/

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#666

Post by cell_cycle »

agumonkey wrote: post #309
olivierestsage wrote: post #101

I hear a lot about the declining popularity of Emacs, but I always wonder how much it is overstating the case. As a tech enthusiast but (mostly) non-programmer, my perception has actually been that the "cool factor" of Emacs has been on the rise. Around 2011 or so, I hardly ever saw mention of it online. Now a day hardly go by on places like Reddit's "unixporn" board that someone doesn't post their slick setup with E…

I consider the article a bit absurd. Emacs is only less popular relative to the set of editors one can pick today. Emacs has never been more popular or alive. melpa, emacsrocks, famous magit/org, even emacs confs and emacs talks at lisp confs.. Plus maybe "more is less" is adequate when it comes to emacs. Too many people may create friction or waste. Let it be low and slow, it's fine, emacs has stopped sprinting, it'…

You know that is not an article but discussion about emails from emacs development list, right?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#667

Post by agumonkey »

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…

You forgot new employee 0:

1. Install Emacs

2. Finds magit

3. Questions reality before swimming in new found joy

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#668

Post by agumonkey »

cell_cycle wrote: post #666
agumonkey wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider the article a bit absurd. Emacs is only less popular relative to the set of editors one can pick today. Emacs has never been more popular or alive. melpa, emacsrocks, famous magit/org, even emacs confs and emacs talks at lisp confs.. Plus maybe "more is less" is adequate when it comes to emacs. Too many people may create friction or waste. Let it be low and slow, it's fine, emacs has stopped sprinting, it'…

You know that is not an article but discussion about emails from emacs development list, right?

I couldn't read after the introduction.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#669

Post by burning_hamster »

cdrini wrote: post #619
adimitrov wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 machi…

What are your favourite features about magit? I switch between Pycharm and Vs code and terminal for my git usage. I find Pycharm has a really great git blame ui that makes it easy to walk back in time and investigate changes. It lets you toggle "Annotations" next to the line number, that display the SHA. From there, you can right click > show diff, from which you can _also_ show annotations, and continue jumping back…

> What are your favourite features about magit?

For a similarly complex task, there is no program with a better UI.

Magit manages to optimize for both, speed and discoverability: 99% of all actions are 2-3 keystrokes away, and at each stage of that process, magit will tell you your options. For example, invoke magit, press 'b' brings up the branching menu, basically a keymap for letter -> action. Pressing 'c' for checkout then starts a new branch creation. The default branchpoint is your current branch. If that is fine, press enter, otherwise type out the branch name (tab completion for all possibilities, local and remote). Finally, you name your branch. So in 99% of the cases, it is b>c>enter>my_cool_new_feature>enter, done.

Before magit, using version control was a necessary evil (for me). Nowadays, it is so effortless, so natural, that it hardly registers in my attention -- similar to the way that you automatically save the file that you are working on after a couple of lines of writing without noticing that you are doing it.

All cli tools should have a magit interface. World peace and happiness would ensue.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#670

Post by smt88 »

vvillena wrote: post #647
smt88 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> magit Lots of editors have git plugins. The question is, what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? > slime This is a pretty niche need, but sure. I would agree that people writing most Lisps (excluding Clojure) are better off using something like Emacs. > Org mode The fact that my editor doesn't have this is a feature for me. I want something with a clickable GUI that syncs to my phone, gives me remi…

> what can you do with magit that you can't do with those? It's not the "what", it's the "how". Magit enables extremely fancy workflows with great simplicity, and its UI is self-discoverable and well laid-out. Magit has the best UX of any git tool.

> its UI is self-discoverable and well laid-out. Magit has the best UX of any git tool.

Which others have you tried?

The way you described Magit is exactly how I would describe SmartGit and also the built-in git features of several IDEs, including the Jetbrains family and Visual Studio (although I dislike Visual Studio because it's slow).

Post reply on HN