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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#731

Post by arvinsim »

enitihas wrote: post #494
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…

Or even better New employee workflow at company Z 1. Install the Jetbtains toolbox 2. Have IDEs for several languages with consistent features and semantics. 3. Minimal to no configuration needed 4. Profit.

My progression in editors was something like Sublime -> GVim -> Spacemacs -> VSCode -> Jetbrains.

After all those years, there are 2 main takeaways for me.

1. I love modal editing, not necessarily Vim

2. My time is better spent doing actual work or enjoying my hobbies than fiddling around with configurations.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#732

Post by look_lookatme »

jakear wrote: post #722
look_lookatme wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Emacs land, ~/.emacs is executed as an arbitrary code. I would like to be able to have a ~/.vscode.ts that contain a function and I would like to map that function to command+t. It doesn't seem like a stretch to offer that feature. Right now I have to use something like this:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ego-digi...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#733

Post by chrischen »

m463 wrote: post #585
chrischen wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does emacs have better support for completion than vim?

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryCompletion

Is this language specific? For typescript at least Vim can use the same completion server as VS code (and so can emacs for that matter).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#734

Post by raverbashing »

michaelmrose wrote: post #700
raverbashing wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no idea why you would be running Emacs in a terminal in the first place. I don't see an advantage of using it outside of the terminal in the first place to be honest. That's the good part about vim. Or if it's complicated for you, use nano. Done. Editing of files while you're in the terminal. And yes vimscript is annoying, but it seems to be simple enough for most of the basic stuff. Otherwise there are plen…

https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2016/12/29/don-t-use-terminal-e... Accepting the terminal version is accepting an inferior environment with no upside.

Interesting to know. Though calling the terminal only version an "inferior version" to me sounds like they are aware of its caveats.

TRAMP sounds nice but a lot of times I can't have emacs on the other side. And vim with screen/tmux works fine

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#735

Post by michaelmrose »

random_cynic wrote: post #726
michaelmrose wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Did you mean to ask if I'd ever met an Emacs user? I'm pretty sure we both pass people who haven't heard of any text editor or IDE all the time.

I'm not likely to meet many Emacs users regularly as I don't work in tech I'm just interested in it. I've met Emacs and vim users at a clojure meet up but that isn't exactly shocking.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#736

Post by diffeomorphism »

101404 wrote: post #603
diffeomorphism wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which is it: VS Code is maximally unsuited for everyone or the previous argument was nonsense?

Your comment doesn't make sense. What are you trying to say?

ELI5:

- Article: Non-trivial config is bad. Hence emacs is bad but VS is good.

- My post: Not having non-trivial config is bad.

- Your post: VS has non-trivial config and even more/better than emacs.

- My reply: So do you agree with article and now VS is "maximally unsuitable for everyone" (the quote for "bad" from the article)? Or do you disagree with article?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#737

Post by ethelward »

hodanli wrote: post #683
Nashooo wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> web-based

And that's already not a decent concurrent for org-mode. Not that I have a grudge against web tech, but no self-hosting of my most personal data and no offline abilities is a deal-breaker for me.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#738

Post by cstork12 »

Reelin wrote: post #502
a1369209993 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Alt is not always Alt either, and apparently for a lot of people Ctrl is actually Caps Lock (to help with RSI?).

I think you misunderstood. Control, alt, meta, hyper, and super are (at least on my current OS) distinct modifiers. There are also keys bearing some of those names on most keyboards which makes things confusing to talk about. Each modifier can be mapped to any physical key. For example, I'm one of those control as caps lock people you mentioned. I then have hyper on the left control key, alt and meta (yes both) on th…

Could you explain your rationale for this configuration?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#739

Post by rleigh »

Reelin wrote: post #502
a1369209993 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Alt is not always Alt either, and apparently for a lot of people Ctrl is actually Caps Lock (to help with RSI?).

I think you misunderstood. Control, alt, meta, hyper, and super are (at least on my current OS) distinct modifiers. There are also keys bearing some of those names on most keyboards which makes things confusing to talk about. Each modifier can be mapped to any physical key. For example, I'm one of those control as caps lock people you mentioned. I then have hyper on the left control key, alt and meta (yes both) on th…

I've never seen a keyboard with hyper or super. I doubt many people have, since they were only present on hardware obsoleted decades ago. Meta, aka the windows key on most PC keyboard, is usually present, but most people wouldn't know its name. On Windows, it's not even usefully bindable since Windows uses various shortcuts for it by default. On Linux, it's not bound to Meta by default by most distributions. So for the vast majority of people, it's just Alt.

I don't think Emacs has done itself any favours by using obscure and non-standard terminology based upon machines from the '70s which few people have heard of, let alone experienced. For the vast, vast majority of us, we all have bog-standard PC or Mac keyboards, and have done for the past 30+ years. It would have been in everyone's interest to standardise on terminology and keybindings which were immediately understandable and usable by all.

Given that every other application uses the standard terminology and keybindings, and that I don't see much in the way of compelling advantage to keeping the non-standard bindings other than habit, I think preserving backward compatibility for four decades was laudable but misguided.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#740

Post by tome »

DonHopkins wrote: post #713
tome wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 avoid…

Very interesting. Thanks!
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