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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#751

Post by cdrini »

erikbye wrote: post #644
cdrini wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the mouse centric experience thing makes sense when _writing_ code, I don't think it makes as much sense for reading/refactoring code. I'm not an Emacs user, but watching some of my colleagues navigating a codebase with Emacs looks not only slow, but also very mentally taxing. They often switch to grep searching, then select the results in order to iterate over them in Emacs. Or they have to remember full pa…

These are exactly the things I find better and faster in Emacs. Watch video below and imagine searching that way but for all files in your project. Results in real-time, instantly taken to content when you highlight and browse results with arrow keys or further narrow down by typing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfasCCuCEgM IMO VSCode's ctrl-shift-f doesn't come close. And its symbol search is just for symbols, no…

Oh nice! That's pretty similar to the VS Code's search experience; I didn't know emacs had that built in! I have a colleague who uses emacs and he always uses grep for stuff like this and it makes my eyes bleed :P

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#752

Post by cdrini »

burning_hamster wrote: post #669
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…

> What are your favourite features about magit? For a similarly complex task, there is no program with a better UI. Magit manages to optimize for both, speed and discoverability: 99% of all actions are 2-3 keystrokes away, and at each stage of that process, magit will tell you your options. For example, invoke magit, press 'b' brings up the branching menu, basically a keymap for letter -> action. Pressing 'c' for che…

> All cli tools should have a magit interface. World peace and happiness would ensue.

:) Ahhhh, I think I understand! So magit is like an autocompleting wrapper/reorganization around the git cli. That does sound great! There are some git commands which would be super annoying to do via a UI (not to mention if you add _all_ of git's features to a UI, good luck making anything discoverable :P), but in the CLI they're kind of awkward cause unless it's something I use very frequently, I forget the syntax (looking at you git bisect). This sounds like it would make those significantly easier to use, _and_ help the developer discover new git commands they might not be aware of (looking at you, git bisect :P).

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#753

Post by 6c696e7578 »

_vbdg wrote: post #621
6c696e7578 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. I tried spacevim, via their docker container. First impressions were 100% CPU use after entering: int main( I'll stick to tried and tested vim.

If one needs a docker container to run a text editor, I think that says all that needs to be said about it.

Well, sort of. Something like spacevim requires some dependencies I imaging. Docker is sort of a package manager, so it makes sense to run the 1.1G docker image to see what you're getting into.

Anyway, this way I saw an issue early on that stopped me from going any further, and saved me much time and heart ache.

Sticking to my plain old .vimrc for now.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#754

Post by cdrini »

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…

Thanks for the examples! The magit page is a little hard for me to grok why it might be worth switching to something else.

> Did you know that you can stash index and working tree separately?

What does this mean? Can you give an example?

> Also, I've become my team's go-to rebase monkey.

Haha, hello friend. I love rebasing; it always breaks my heart a little when I see "Merged master into branch X" commits :P My main git rebase flow is `git checkout master; git pull upstream master; git checkout X; git rebase -i master` + vim. Having multiple branches that depend on a shared branch does get a little messy though. How does magit make this flow better?

> Conflicts still suck, but less so.

Hahaha, that's all you can hope for with merge conflicts!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#755

Post by cdrini »

jamespo wrote: post #742
cdrini wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Ahh, that's not what I was going for. I'm actually just curious. I'm willing to give emacs a try, but it just seems like it has kind of a steep learning curve, so want some strong reasons to know if it's worthwhile. This was the best I could find googling: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/8h1cxa/any_long_time...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#756

Post by guenthert »

IDEs come and go, Emacs stays.

Turbo Pascal (wayyy back) was quite impressive (then), Visual Age for Java much more so some fifteen years later. IntelliJ is alright (prefer it over Eclipse, which somehow managed to lose the smart features of its predecessor). Haven't tried VS Code yet, but from the videos I've seen, it seems quite handy.

I stick with Emacs for two reasons: familiarity and SLIME (the next best thing to a LISP Machine ;-}

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#757

Post by nunb »

jamespo wrote: post #742
cdrini wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Come now, that’s a bit harsh... he didn’t nitpick at all, just asked for some pointers!

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#758

Post by balladeer »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #549
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…

> The fact that everyone has to have a non-empty, non trivial .emacs file means it is maximally unsuitable - for everyone. The fact that you don't have one for VS Code shows that any modifications to make it better are too difficult and that you just have to make do with how it comes out of the box.

I use VS Code sparsely but this is what has worked for me https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.cod...

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#759

Post by throwanem »

cdrini wrote: post #755
jamespo wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ahh, that's not what I was going for. I'm actually just curious. I'm willing to give emacs a try, but it just seems like it has kind of a steep learning curve, so want some strong reasons to know if it's worthwhile. This was the best I could find googling: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/8h1cxa/any_long_time...

I mean, a lot of it is just the kind of complex one-off text transformations that would normally require a throwaway script or program to express. (They do in Emacs too, but you can write it as inline Lisp forms in the replacement side of a PCRE find-and-replace, and not deal with any boilerplate.) Refactors and stuff like that all happen through LSP providers, just like in VS Code.

If you're looking for a strong reason to think Emacs is worthwhile as a totally new user, I'd point instead to Magit, an extremely powerful and comfortable git porcelain, and Org-mode, which is simply the most powerful and flexible single-user notetaking/outlining/live code notebook tool yet created. Those are the two Emacs features I see most often mentioned as the subject of sentences like "I don't use Emacs for anything else, but I do use it for X because nothing else comes close".

That said, as I mentioned above, I'm not really here to evangelize Emacs. It definitely does have a steep learning curve, enough so that unless you see a clear killer feature (in my case, TRAMP's transparent remote file editing, since I edited remote files a lot in those days), it's not likely to be worth the trouble.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#760

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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