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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#681

Post by chipotle_coyote »

didibus wrote: post #507
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think you're right on the whole here about "Emacs people," but you did an interesting thing in the first sentence: you contrasted experienced Emacs user with junior developer. And I think that actually points to a problem: people who are experienced developers but not experienced Emacs users are going to be in much the same position as the OP's description. While I know the basics of Emacs, every time I try t…

> As for me, well, when Spacemacs moves the LSP layer to its non-development branch, I'll probably give it a try again You're doing yourself a discervice for not just using Spacemacs develop branch. It's actually more stable than the master branch.

Interesting. I switched to the develop branch the other day (yes, just to try to get LSP working!) and ran into some glitch that I didn't have the time to investigate -- a complaint about the .spacemacs file missing a variable or something. I'll probably try again this weekend.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#682

Post by pwinnski »

1ark wrote: post #348
pwinnski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? And yet I just typed 'emacs tutorial' into DDG, and the first three results all hit you right away with descriptions of keys that don't physically exist on a modern keyboard. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/ http://www.jesshamrick.com/2012/09/10/absolute-beginners-gui... https://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/emacs-tutoria... I've never tried emacs in large part because I've been convinced over…

I'm curious, how do you remember key combinations in other IDEs? I learned Vim, it was tough, but I remember a handful of commands I use all the time. And used Vim mode when available in IDEs when available. Spent a few years with VS Code, but I could never remember certain keys to navigate between panels for example. But the F1 key is great though. For w/e reason, I tried Emacs with evil-mode. I don't have to rememb…

In most IDEs, they're the same key combos I use in non-IDE products. I'm on a Mac, so Cmd-X, Cmd-C, and Cmd-V work pretty much everywhere. They even work at a terminal prompt, and the latter two work in vi.

I did learn vi years ago, but I'm sure I still don't tap but 10% of its power, despite using it daily, precisely because the key combinations seem arcane to me.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#683

Post by hodanli »

Nashooo wrote: post #648
random_cynic wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. No one cares (other than Emacs users). There are better tools designed for those purposes. There's a reason the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing well is still so popular and widely used. Rather tha…

Which tool would you suggest for Org-mode? I have been reading up on it and it almost made me want to use emacs. But if there is a better tool designed for it's purpose..

you can try workflowy

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#684

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Torwald wrote: post #537
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think you're right on the whole here about "Emacs people," but you did an interesting thing in the first sentence: you contrasted experienced Emacs user with junior developer. And I think that actually points to a problem: people who are experienced developers but not experienced Emacs users are going to be in much the same position as the OP's description. While I know the basics of Emacs, every time I try t…

> I'm probably gonna keep doing my technical writing in BBEdit until I die, but that's a different post. Please produce that post. Also, why not developing in BBEdit?

BBEdit's indenting and completion engines just aren't as smart as other editors -- I suspect in the latter case they'll have to add LSP support on their own (right now I don't think it can even be added externally because their API doesn't expose the right event hooks), and in the former case, I have a suspicion Bare Bones Software just has a philosophical objection to context-aware indenting. With those objections aside, BBEdit is still pretty good for development.

For the technical writing, I actually wrote a comment here somewhere about that in another post; I'll have to dig it up and turn it into a blog post at some point. But I called it a "fast Swiss army knife for text." Its "open file by name via fuzzy searching" command lets you enter multiple files, its multi-file search window lets you save file filters with meaningful names (and you can save grep patterns the same way, and in BBEdit 13 there's even a "Pattern Playground" that lets you nondestructively test out complex regexes on your current document). Projects get their own persistent scratchpads and Unix worksheets. And, a bit relevant to an Emacs thread, BBEdit has a bit of Emacs-ish keybinding support over and what Mac editors normally do, although it's decidedly not an Emacs emulation layer.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#685

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #608
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, to some extent, maybe. I appreciate what you’re saying, and I do hate being slowed down in the moment. I’ve got a handcrafted AutoHotKey script and a 22 button gaming mouse fine tuned for 2D CAD / CAM software at work, so while I am definitely in to this sort of customisation... If I’m honest with myself I don’t really get more work done because I end up using the time being unproductive elsewhere. There’s defi…

> because I end up using the time being unproductive elsewhere. Isn't that literally the point ? If you can do your task in 10% less time, and then end up spending that 10% procrastinating on HN, then you still win - the task gets done, and you also get to sneak in something nice. And if you find you'd rather spend that time on something else, or doing more work to finish everything faster, you can choose to do so .…

> Isn't that literally the point?

Ah, yep, you might have a point there!

Dunno how I missed that. Seems obvious now.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#686

Post by scooble »

fredmorcos wrote: post #540
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 worked for a company where the founder thought everybody should use the same tools (meaning the tools he used: OpenSuse, KDE, VSCode, etc...) so that we can help each other and, like you propose, we wouldn't have to fiddle with anything since he would provide configuration for everything. I've had plenty of problems running this garbage, and everytime he wouldn't help and would just say something along the lines of…

These kinds of discussions tend to overlook that using tools that you enjoy using and are familiar with can be a virtue in itself.

I doubt that any of the editors/IDEs under discussion make it impossible to do the work we need to do. And I'm willing to bet that forcing an employee to use a tool they don't enjoy will have a much higher impact on their productivity than any marginal differences in functionality between that tool and their preferred option.

I use vim because I enjoy using it and it is sufficient for the tasks I need to do. The idea that this reason is not enough and I need to justify my choice by proving it is a more productive option than all other editors/ides strikes me as deeply odd.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#687

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #677
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assure you I'd never propose to change emacs bindings at all, merely have a switchable alternate set. I think that would be possible? But even if you did so, there's too much else, far deeper that couldn't be amended. I think we agree it's not a credible proposition. I suspect emacs' enormous toolkit can't be exposed consistently without making it inconsistent. I can live with emacs as it is, very happily.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#688

Post by korethr »

plorkyeran wrote: post #148
korethr wrote: post #59

A shame Stallman put the kibosh on QT quickly. Is he planning on there being a GPLv4? Not in the "leaving that option open for the future" kind of planning, but more, "A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4." Because if they truly want a cross platform visual interface, AFAICT, QT is the closest you're going to get, and IMO, is the best means of doing so. Every QT app I'v…

Qt is licensed under GPLv2 or GPLv3, while GTK is LGPLv2.1+. If the FSF makes a GPLv4, GTK will automatically be available under that license, while Qt will not.

> If the FSF makes a GPLv4, GTK will automatically be available under that license, while Qt will not.

If that were the case, then why was GTK not updated to GPL or LGPLv3 when the FSF came up with that group of licenses?

When I looked it up, I found that QT is available under LGPLv3[1], so unless there is already plans to ensure that a GPLv4 is not license compatible with LGPLv3, I don't buy it.

1. https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/lgpl.html

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#689

Post by mplanchard »

random_cynic wrote: post #618
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…

>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. No one cares (other than Emacs users). There are better tools designed for those purposes. There's a reason the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing well is still so popular and widely used. Rather tha…

This comment is quite harsh and definitely doesn’t seem to assume good faith in the person you’re replying to
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