Making Emacs Popular Again • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#671

Post by smt88 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #529

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…

> 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 reminders, and can be shared with coworkers when necessary. Check out Orgzly from F-droid repos.

OK, I checked it out. I'm still not seeing reminders integrated with the notifications on my phone, nor am I seeing anything that the people on my marketing team would touch with a 10-ft pole.

There are lots of tools I'd use if I weren't programming for work and didn't have a team of mixed technical skills, and perhaps Emacs fits into that category.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#672

Post by josteink » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

celeritascelery wrote: post #118

josteink wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who really doesn’t “get” or care for Vim, why should I contribute to an alternate Emacs-“distro” entirely focused on an existing Vi user-base, using non-standard conventions and keybindings? I mean good for them having that option, but what’s in that thing for me?

You don't have to use vim keys in Spacemacs or Doom. You can just use the regular ones if you want.

But then what does Spacemacs offer me over plain Emacs?

And I’ll also have to learn all the things it does differently. All in all, sounds like a net negative to me.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#673

Post by smt88 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

adimitrov wrote: post #579

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…

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…

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

You can also takes notes in markdown docs and/or code comments (it has a built-in TODO detector and organizer).

> they use an unholy mix of JetBrains, GitKraken and the command line on Linux, and Tortoise, SourceTree, JetBrains and the command line on Windows

I just use SmartGit for git. It's configurable with workflows (or custom commands), navigable with a keyboard, visual, clickable, and actually "smart" -- it warns you if it thinks you're about to do something stupid, like overwrite a repository's history.

> 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.

This is good info. These are all things I really, really don't want to do in my IDE. I want my IDE to be a good IDE, and I want my other tools to be purpose-built as well.

Switching apps is not painful to me at all. I often have a screen with a git GUI, IDE, browser, and DB GUI all open at the same time.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#674

Post by smt88 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

joshuaellinger wrote: post #560

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…

1. Nothing I've found comes anywhere close to Emacs support for keyboard macros. Zero latency to record. Records every keystroke. Very very consistent behavior. Infinite undo. Kill Ring. Register support. Despite being an expert Emacs user, I'm mostly in VS Code these days because it has syntax highlighting, git support, and linting out of the the box. But I always go back to Emacs when I need to transform a bit of t…

What are some examples of keyboard macros you use? I read a lot about people loving keyboard macros, but I can honestly say I've never thought of a use-case for them. There's already a built-in IDE automation for everything I could think to do with a macro.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#675

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #232

Grimm665 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you're over-emphasizing the problem with this terminology. When I first started learning Emacs it took me all of 5 minutes to get used to the new terms, it isn't that hard. Maybe there's an argument for the lack of value of using older terminology, but again, I think this problem is overblown.

I'm not trying to say this is the most critical problem; I'm saying it's one example of many, and it spends a lot of "weirdness budget" without necessarily providing value in exchange. "kill/yank" is another example, and there are many more where those come from; the volume of them creates a "thousand papercuts" problem. In the Rust language design, we're careful about what we spend our "weirdness budget" on. We've a…

[deleted]

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#676

Post by dleslie » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #445

dleslie wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood what you meant. "Open my doc in notepad or any other text editor. Put comments wherever you want; if you'd be so kind as to put them on their own line with a # at the start it would save me some time." Easy peasy. The beauty of org is that it's just a text file. You don't need Emacs to edit it.

And then you have line endings and weird control characters and emoji don’t work in Emacs, etc etc I too have used Emacs a lot. I’m getting off the boat.

UTF Emojis work in Emacs, and control characters are displayed and easily removed.

If you're git-savvy it's even easier to merge the comments in by using Magit and reviewing the changes individually.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#677

Post by alexhutcheson » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #576

spindle wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cho…

Unfortunately the rest of the software world settled on keybindings for cut and copy that generate almost the greatest possible pain for Emacs to migrate to them. C-c and C-x are used for dozens of the most important commands. It's technically feasible, but switching would be hard and existing users would be really upset.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#678

Post by alexhutcheson » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

thiht wrote: post #606

F-0X wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the old "I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer". Actually, its an extremely important point. Tools which optimise for the professional are better than those which do so for the noob. Whenever you can achieve both, do so, but never side with the beginner otherwise. People should learn their tools, and they shouldn't be beginners for long, so making things "friendly" at the cost of rewarding experti…

You can absolutely do both. In VSCode, if I don't know how to perform an action, I just hit Ctrl+Shift+P and the fuzzy search panel with all the possible action shows up, with the associated keyboard shortcut next to it so I can remember it for next time. In emacs, I have absolutely no idea how to discover features, and if I find something I still have to understand what the M- and C- mean

> In emacs, I have absolutely no idea how to discover features

The built-in "help" functionality[1] is really great. C-h a will find useful documentation for what you need 90% of the time, and the manual is there for most of the rest. It's particularly useful for keybindings - C-h w for "what's the keyboard shortcut for this command" and C-h k for "what command does this keyboard shortcut run.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/He...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#679

Post by chipotle_coyote » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

jgalentine007 wrote: post #482

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Sort of. Like the other person who replied about the Emacs plugin, I find myself running into issues with the Vim plugin -- usually not the keybindings as much as the ex-style commands. For instance, ":20,27m." will move a block of text in Vi/Vim to under the current location; that doesn't work in VSCode Vim. Worse for me personally, I've gotten really used to the ":find" command being the (rough) equivalent of a…

Ctrl+p will let you search nicely for files in vscode. At least the VI integration is better than the extension I use with Visual Studio.

Oh, yeah, I do use that (well, Cmd-P over here in Mac-world). It's just when I get into Vim mode I type ":find" reflexively and I get disappointed for a moment. :)

(Ironically, there's a Vim plugin called CtrlP to do the same thing that I never use because I find it confusing and weird compared to everybody else's implementation of the same idea...)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#680

Post by emidln » Fri, May 08, 2020, 4:05 PM 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…

> I've always said that it's better to grasp Emacs with a vanilla config or a small starter kit and see if you can make it grow step by step in a journey that takes years.

I moved to Spacemacs becaues I wanted to write clojure without maintaining my own Clojure IDE in vim+tmux (this was around 2014, maybe 2015). I was productive in Spacemacs in around 10 minutes. I went from never using Emacs to fixing bugs and writing extensions in Emacs in less than two weeks because Spacemacs pervasively uses which-key to provide discoverability and had vim-style shortcuts I could use for real work (rather than learning a new set of keybindings). The groupings of things into layers makes studying what ecosystem packages provide what functionality much easier than blindly googling "how to do X in emacs" and getting 3000 "unique" (read: half-baked if you're lucky) solutions.

This idea that you should suffer for hours/days/weeks building your init.el from scratch while adapting to terminology, keybindings, and a lack of familiarity with the ecosystem is absolutely insane. If you can use vi, you're better off with Spacemacs.