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

711–720 of 782 posts

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#711

Post by graynk »

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…

> if you do this in the time you would be watching Netflix instead of the time you are supposed to be working

And why would I be doing that? Configuring and learning your work tools is part of work, it should be done in work time.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#712

Post by catblast »

microcolonel wrote: post #319
catblast wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being an idiot. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mo... C is an abbreviation for . You can map pretty much any key to any other key, that’s neither here nor there. M is for meta, s is for super, S is for shift, A is for alt, H is for hyper. My control key is mapped at the window manager and terminal level. As far as emacs is concerned it’s control. If I map my R key to emit a control ke…

> M is for meta, s is for super, S is for shift, A is for alt, H is for hyper. But if we're going down that road, M is for alt really, and super wasn't always what Xf86 says it is (the windows/command key). The mapping of keys is arbitrary, but the bindings to the symbols are documented and many defaults exist.

No M is for meta. These names predate X let alone XFree86 by many years. The names don’t even come from a Unix system. Even GNU emacs predates XFree86 by 6 years.

Your writing implies that Emacs is something like the notepad of Ubuntu. But it’s history is much more extensive than that—- which happens to be one of its unique selling points.

Anyway the point regardless of historical context, is that for all sensible people, that capital C is being used as an abbreviation for the word Control. You’re just being a prat correcting people. You’re not even technically correct, you’re just wrong.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#713

Post by DonHopkins »

tome wrote: post #518
DonHopkins wrote: post #167

From: rms@AI.MIT.EDU In general, the way for a problem to be fixed is for someone who knows how to fix it right simply to do so. Any solution that involves discussion should be avoided except as a last resort, because it is inefficient.

Is this a real email? Do you have a reference? Google didn't turn anything up.

Dale Worley posted it to a mailing list in '89, and I asked him where it came from:

    Date: Mon, 18 Sep 89 21:55:13 EDT
    From: drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU
    To: don@brillig.umd.edu
    Subject: An interesting bit of philosophy from RMS

       From: Don Hopkins 

         From: rms@AI.MIT.EDU

         In general, the way for a problem to be fixed is for someone
         who knows how to fix it right simply to do so.  Any solution
         that involves discussion should be avoided except as a last
         resort, because it is inefficient.

       Interesting all right! When/where and in what context did he say
       this?

    It was on one of the Emacs newsgroups, where lots of reasonably
    uninformed discussion had broken out on how to resolve the fact that
    VM and Gnus (I think) interfered with each other, because they both
    used the overlay-arrow mechanism.

    Dale
Searching Google Groups for the first sentence found the unexpurgated version:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22In$20general$2C$...

    Date: 9/11/89
    From: rms@ai.mit.edu 
    Newsgroup: gnu.emacs
    Subject: No more on overlay-arrow-position

    I don't think most Emacs users want to participate in a discussion
    about how to solve a fairly obscure problem in how Emacs is implemented.
    This kind of discussion doesn't help me solve the problem.  I know you
    mean well, but you aren't experts.  Most of this discussion consists
    of proposals that are completely wrong, or won't work, followed by
    refutations and counterproposals.  When I decide to fix this for
    version 19, I won't read the discussion; I'll just fix it--it will
    take less time.

    In general, the way for a problem to be fixed is for someone who knows
    how to fix it right simply to do so.  Any solution that involves
    discussion should be avoided except as a last resort, because it is
    inefficient.

    Remember, the purpose of info-gnu-emacs (and its repeater newsgroup,
    gnu.emacs) is to carry the information that *every Emacs user will
    want to know*.  There's nothing wrong with non-experts discussing how
    Emacs bugs might be fixed, but please don't do it here.
RMS also doesn't like people posting baby announcements to mailing lists that are clearly intended for making dinner arrangements (and the baby in question is 27 years old now):

http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

I love Lile's response, who has the grace and composure of dang:

>Please send your "fucks" via personal mail and refrain from using Kabuki-west for such messages. -Lile Elam

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#714

Post by agumonkey »

tetris11 wrote: post #702
agumonkey wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot new employee 0: 1. Install Emacs 2. Finds magit 3. Questions reality before swimming in new found joy

Magit is so good that it should be shipped by default into Emacs. Alas the process of integrating any outside code into Emacs is tangled behind three layers of bulletproof glass. I'm not against the glass, as it's a good defence against hostile thieves, but it sure kills any desire to merge outside code

magit is clearly a cosmic planet alignment, whatever happens is a choice from the universe I won't question

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#715

Post by tehbeard »

dmortin wrote: post #52
malkia wrote: post #10

I used to use emacs daily, but nowadays sticking to "mg" and "vscode"...

Org mode is really good for note taking, so emacs has uses even if one does not use it for programming.

I gave it an honest try for 6 months and even as good as Org-mode is (I used it to track project tasks, notes, timelogs, even had a go at custom templates), the 80s design choices and trying to find information that didn't expect a full working knowledge pushed me away from Emacs, might have been made worse trying to do this on "the devil's OS".

I'd have loved to have been able to give magit a go.

I do still have Orgzly on my phone though.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#716

Post by bagol »

ch1lang0 wrote: post #383

Emacs is not an editor, is a personal travel to find and build your ultimate editor through the years, a solution that will work forever but only for you. Yes, is the most powerful tool that ever existed, a beautiful monstrosity, no other editor will let you cherry-picking git commits, handle your agenda, export to PDF, measure the time for a cup of tea and estimate the new project costs. In some point Emacs becomes…

Out of curiosity, what is software about to you and how does elisp teach you?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#717

Post by catalogia »

alpaca128 wrote: post #703
wainstead wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few shell modes in Emacs. I think ansi-term might do what you want for a full screen interactive terminal application.

I tried all 3 terminals I could find and none works. Apparently they all use the same ancient base that was developed before interactive terminal UIs were a thing.

ncurses programs absolutely do work with ansi-term, which is a terminal emulator. They don't work with eshell, which is not a terminal emulator.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#718

Post by chewxy »

acomar wrote: post #705
chewxy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found lsp-mode to be quite cool (recently reformatted my machine, and so decided to modernize). lsp-ui + company mode kills the input latency on any 4k display on Ubuntu tho. Input latency is now VS-Code/Atom level slow. Unbearable. Even with delay set to 0

This is much, much better on Emacs 27 with native json parsing. Once the language server is fully loaded (which can take a little while sometimes), input lag becomes insignificant again. Strongly recommend upgrading.

Mine's GNU Emacs 27.0.91 (build 1).

Thinking of switching to gccemacs for the native elisp goodness. But way too much yak shaving has been done already. I just disabled lsp-ui and lsp-company and all good.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#719

Post by chipotle_coyote »

didibus wrote: post #698
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need to run SPC f e D to do a 3-way merge of your .spacemacs everytime after you upgrade Spacemacs. As changes to Spacemacs are made, there might need more or less things in the .spacemacs file. So you always need to do a manual merge of the changes.

Thanks for the tip. I had no idea that was a thing -- although it absolutely makes sense, thinking about it!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#720

Post by no_wizard »

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…

Thats just plan incorrect. JetBrains lets you do the following, out of the box:

- Edit Code - Debug Said Code - Run Said Code - Manage your repo via Git, SVN, or Perforce - Has GitHub integration built in - Has PlantUML integration for creating UML diagrams via their markdown editor (its pretty nifty and I believe now bundled by default) - Connect multiple SSH sessions - Connect multiple SFTP sessions (semantics right)

and so on and son on..I can even do remote editing as if its there, righ tin front of me. you can't even tell if the filesystem is remote because of how it populates in the IDE.

So please, what doe sit not actually do again?

and via plugins, (and a plugin ecosystem that tends to be well manicured/maintained, at that), you can add an LSP or many other languages that are supported. I've tried many many editors, and JetBrain IDE plugins are some of the highest quality i've ever worked with.

So please, tell me, what do they not do again?

Post reply on HN