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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#721

Post by vvillena »

smt88 wrote: post #670
vvillena wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

The main ones I've used for some time are the git CLI (which should be counted as a git toolset too), Sourcetree, the GUI inside IntelliJ, and Magit. I currently use Magit + the git CLI for some quick commands.

For me, Magit code staging is the best I've tried: staging whole files is as easy as staging single lines, which means my commits are more meaningful. Magit also allows me to use some fancy features without having to remember they exist, thanks to the well-thought command popups. Last, it's integrated with Emacs: this means I can move through code and write my commit messages in a familiar, coherent way.

The final advantage for me is that Emacs and Magit are forever. They will live longer than any other tool out there.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#722

Post by jakear »

look_lookatme wrote: post #310
jakear wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use keyboard for all of those things in VS Code, just by the way :) (On the team)

Awesome. Y'all do great work. I have a couple of questions if you are checking this thread: 1. Do y'all do security analysis on extensions? Static analysis etc? Specifically, I am talking about detecting potential source exfiltration type stuff. 2. Any chance you'll develop the ability to customize the editor via some personal scripts vs a plugin? I'd like to implement a command to do a specific thing (toggle between…

1) see info here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/extension-gallery#... I’m not going to say more here, but if you post an issue someone will get back to you. :)

2. I’d recommend just finding an extension that does this. It wouldn’t be hard for an extension to implement, and supporting multiple extensibility classes in core when we don’t need to probably won’t happen. What exactly are you looking for in an “official path“?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#723

Post by tester89 »

asdf123wtf wrote: post #355
agentultra wrote: post #29

Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers? I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scriv…

I dunno... I think newer editors are often easier to extend than emacs. Think atom or vscode or even sublime. They're all extensible enough such that emacs has no real major advantage IMHO. They can be extended with mainstream languages that many programmers already know, instead of an idiosyncratic lisp with no practical application outside of emacs itself. Emacs still has some great modes (like tramp) - but overall…

I’ve been porting the Sly IDE to Sublime and basically I would say Sublime is a hostile development environment, a lot of times errors dont trigger stack traces and just silently fail which is super frustrating.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#724

Post by pcj-github »

Used emacs for years, switched to VSC as it's just more compatible with the present time in terms of plugins, languages, and even simply working with other people. Emacs is a thing of the past. I do really miss the kill-ring though.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#725

Post by hvis »

sokoloff wrote: post #286
downerending wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re copyright, what would you prefer? Alternatively, what would you even do with the copyright to your fixes and additions to GNU emacs?

I submitted a miniscule patch to tcl-mode (or font-lock) a couple decades ago. It was to speed up syntax highlighting for a particular style of commenting. Maybe a 3-6 line patch, tops. I spent 20x more time back and forth on copyright assignments, including getting a release from my company, etc to get the patch in. I pushed through because I felt like I was always "just one more yak shave away from finishing", but…

You don't have to assign the copyright when your total contribution is below 15 lines of so.

Just something to note.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#726

Post by random_cynic »

michaelmrose wrote: post #696
random_cynic wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New employees 4 and 5 are completely fictitious and only exist in your imagination/reality bubble. In the real world no mortal has ever learned how to use Emacs in 2 hours to be able to work effectively. And like the OC said the documentation for extra packages are horrible, full of bugs and may take additional week to understand how to use effectively.

It's a text editor. You can work when you know enough do common textual operations to add remove and modify text, search through existing text, jump around to different files in the project, and run whatever constitutes a build. More sophisticated ide like features normally constitute reading the documentation for a particular project like cider for clojure. I have no idea why you consider 4 and 5 fictitious. One can…

> You can work when you know enough do common textual operations to add remove and modify text, search through existing text, jump around to different files in the project, and run whatever constitutes a build.

It is one thing to know enough and quite other to be proficient in using them effectively. With the horrible and unintuitive default keybindings it takes even longer to develop muscle memory.

> One can read the entirely of mastering emacs and the cider docs in a reasonable period of time for example.

Yes one can in theory. But again if everybody could become proficient in something just by reading manuals then we could shut down our expensive schools and colleges and any sort of practical training. Also, everyone could then program in `ed` or TECO.

Curious, have you actually met any other person who's not an emacs user in real life, like ever? Here's an experiment, go to any decent software company and ask 5 new hires who've never used Emacs, give them the manual and see how long it takes them to actually do something significant? Then give them VSCode and compare notes.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#727

Post by trocado »

smt88 wrote: post #674
joshuaellinger wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have, say, a list on consecutive lines with a blank line in between them, and you want to delete a character after the second word, add some text at the end, and delete the blank line - with keyboard macros you record these transformations once and then apply them to the rest of the items.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#728

Post by random_cynic »

jjoonathan wrote: post #393
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…

That, and while emacs has a reputation as being the ur-editor from which all text editing innovation stems, the reality is quite the opposite. It's stagnant and hasn't been the center of text editing innovation for at least the last decade, and probably quite a bit longer before that. It was a particularly bad string of basic package incompatibilities that woke me from my emacs evangelist phase, but it was the realiz…

Completely agree. There hasn't been any innovation from Emacs since the 90s. Instead more and more effort has gone into adding useless capabilities into emacs such as mail/news readers, organization systems and even window managers. There's some truth to the statement that "Emacs is an operating system lacking a decent text editor" except that even as an operating system it sucks.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#729

Post by ccktlmazeltov »

commandlinefan wrote: post #650
ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience years ago was that there was a cool factor, and I learned it, and it's still a pain to use (compared to let's say VS Code), and I think that cool factor was just never a thing.

> cool factor I agree there's a certain respect afforded to people who are adept with terminal editors, but there is a practical reason to master them: they're always there, no matter how many layers of SSH you've gone through to get where you are.

actually emacs is rarely there, vim is though.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#730

Post by arvinsim »

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…

> 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 will ask this question in my next job interview. This is a red flag for me. I wouldn't want to work in a company that forces the developers onto a specific editor/IDE.

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