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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#741

Post by erik_seaberg »

Torwald wrote: post #614
erik_seaberg wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time Emacs was created, Lisp was one of the few languages that had automatic memory management and higher-order functions and error handling, but those have been lifted so often that they're now table stakes for modern languages. I'm pushing 50 and excited about Rust because it's finally conceivable to have software that works reliably. I like Emacs, but it's not like I haven't seen my share of crashes in its…

> it's finally conceivable to have software that works reliably. Care to elaborate what you mean by that?

The industry has been trying to write C and then C++ for decades, but it all blows up randomly. Buffer overruns, use after free, shared mutable state. Apparently tooling exists that tries to make Rust-like guarantees, but it's so costly I've literally never seen it used.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#742

Post by jamespo »

cdrini wrote: post #609
throwanem wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much, yeah, from what I've seen. Against the shockingly low ambient baseline of "editors that aren't Vim or Emacs", VS Code's highly usable OOTB experience and broad extension ecosystem are enough of an improvement to constitute a real win despite being so poor by comparison with a thoroughly evolved configuration of either of the Two True Editors. I stick with Emacs because, now having invested more than a de…

> I can do a lot of things in seconds that take VS Code users minutes or hours. Out of curiosity could you provide some examples of some of these?

"Out of curiosity" = "I'm going to nitpick this to hell and back"

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#743

Post by Dayshine »

erikbye wrote: post #642
williamdclt wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never used emacs, so can't compare. But: > I think VSCode is a very mouse-centric experience I never touch my mouse in VSCode. There's many many shortcuts that are configurable, and keyboard navigation isn't not a "second-class citizen" > VSCode is slow compared Yeah, probably true. Never felt like it slowed me down though > And symbol fuzzy search is just for symbols, not all text cmd-t on vscode. Probably not stric…

> cmd-t on vscode. Like I said earlier, that's just for symbols, so no, it's not the same.

So, I write a niche language server along with an adapter for VS Code. What are you frequently jumping to that isn't a symbol?

I can expose anything through the LSP api. Thinking about it, every single piece of text is covered by symbols and falling back to find all references.

The only thing that wouldn't work is trying to jump to syntax, but why would you do that?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#744

Post by sokoloff »

hvis wrote: post #725
sokoloff wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My memory is that my correspondence was directly with rms on this patch and it was required at the time, but the fact that it would no longer required is definitely beneficial, so thanks for that update!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#745

Post by ryukafalz »

emidln wrote: post #680
pantulis wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 writi…

As a counterexample to that somewhat... I initially tried learning emacs with spacemacs, and the amount of customization in spacemacs’s config made it difficult for me to compare it to much of the emacs documentation out there. Whatever documentation spacemacs had at the time was confusing enough to me that it wasn’t quite enough.

I later ended up starting with a stock config, and I probably could pick up spacemacs now if I wanted to, but at this point I don’t feel the need.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#746

Post by ryukafalz »

adimitrov wrote: post #695
cdrini wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your favourite features about magit? I switch between Pycharm and Vs code and terminal for my git usage. I find Pycharm has a really great git blame ui that makes it easy to walk back in time and investigate changes. It lets you toggle "Annotations" next to the line number, that display the SHA. From there, you can right click > show diff, from which you can _also_ show annotations, and continue jumping back…

I think incremental commits are among my favorites in magit. It's so quick and easy to stage and commit selectively. The other thing I love about it is discoverability of git features. Did you know that you can stash index and working tree separately? I only know because of magit. Now that I know, I have actually used it to great success. Also, I've become my team's go-to rebase monkey. What takes my colleagues minut…

I agree with all of this, especially discoverability of git features. I think using magit really helped me build a mental model of what git’s doing and what it can do vs. just using the git CLI on it’s own.

And yeah, incremental committing, the rebase workflow, working with multiple remotes... they’re all a breeze. With the GitHub style PR workflow, I typically set the main repo for a project as the “upstream” remote and my fork as “origin.” With the settings I’m used to for a project, pulling down the latest changes from upstream is two keystrokes: “F u”, and pushing back up to my fork is two more: “P p”.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#747

Post by ryukafalz »

erikbye wrote: post #631
billfruit wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somethings I find more convenient with Emacs than modern IDEs: -Remote file editing with Tramp: This is much better even than using vi/pick over a terminal. -Very flexible kill ring copy paste mechanism: can do complicated text manipulations with easy access to copy paste history. -Easy macro recording and playback. -Very flexible windowing: can show even multiple windows with the same file, even synchronized scrolli…

> emote file editing with Tramp: This is much better even than using vi/pick over a terminal. You're probably aware, but VSCode has great support for editing over SSH.

For those who care about this (I do): that’s a proprietary Microsoft extension and doesn’t work in the free software versions.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/240

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#748

Post by jakear »

look_lookatme wrote: post #732
jakear wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I encourage you to look into writing extensions, an extension which simply registers a command that executes some script at a fixed location would be a good starting point for learning.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#749

Post by 101404 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #736
101404 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You didn't read the comments correctly, hence your confused reply.
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