Emacs is special regarding UIs
lists.gnu.org
Emacs is special regarding UIs
1–10 of 418 posts
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#2Not that it's anything like Emacs, but would SIM Application Toolkit be considered kind of similar? It provided almost a lowest-common-denominator user interface for apps, which could actually run in the smartphone era, although with practically no advantages over a native app.
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#3Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant.
Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#4Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
the new AOT compiler seems promising though and has a good chance of actually making it into the release.
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#5Not that it's anything like Emacs, but would SIM Application Toolkit be considered kind of similar? It provided almost a lowest-common-denominator user interface for apps, which could actually run in the smartphone era, although with practically no advantages over a native app.
You'd be surprised to hear STK is still in use even today by big mobile operators. Some even go as far as to launch campaigns to install STK applets on millions of devices and customers have no idea this is happening in the background.
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#6Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
Yes... but it's not that slow. In practice, emacs works at least as fast as I can think most of the time. This is the most important thing for me. It's the reason why I originally switched to git from svn (Linus also specifically mentions this as a design choice for git). In this day with electron and editors like VSCode I wouldn't call emacs particularly slow.
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#7I can think of a few UI styles Emacs doesn't support (to my knowledge) – line mode terminals, block mode terminals (such as IBM 3270 and 5250), and HTML.
Now, whether any of those UI styles are actually worth supporting is a completely different question. But it is not quite as universal in support of different UIs as this email claims.
(You can technically write line mode applications in Emacs Lisp, try `emacs -batch -l dunnet` for an example. But most Emacs functionality is not available in line mode, the core text editing functionality certainly isn't. There is also a HTTP server available for Emacs [1], so you could use it to implement a HTML-based user interface, but once again the vast majority of Emacs functions are not available over HTTP)
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#8Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
As a non Emacs user, is the speed of Emacs Lisp a frustration in typical day to day usage?
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#9Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
There's some new development going on that compiles Emacs Lisp to native code with GCC and it is a real performance improvement. I've been using it on an unstable Emacs build for the past few weeks and I can feel the difference—noticeably snappier and more satisfying.
It's not 100% ready for day-to-day use yet—the deferred compilation logic seems to be recompiling more often than it has to—but I've been quite happy with it so far, and it will make a substantial improvement for Emacs users once it's stable and rolled out. Hoping it can be released with Emacs 28 or 29 at the latest :).
Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs
#10Emacs Lisp is slow. There has been a multi-decade effort to make Guile support ELisp, and using Guile to make Emacs more performant. Cross platform UI, with a faster Lisp, would allow Emacs to be even more special.
As a non Emacs user, is the speed of Emacs Lisp a frustration in typical day to day usage?
Sometimes. But, in my experience a lot of these advanced development environments can be quite hang-ey if you know what I mean. It’s quite lightweight relatively speaking so more than makes up for it.