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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#31

Post by DreamyCori »

mkesper wrote: post #26
smitty1e wrote: post #18

For those with wretched joints (me), Spacemacs[1] is a way to have all that org-mode[2] functionality, the joys of magit[3] and have it all work well over SSH. Leave all the icons to their fans. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/ [3] https://magit.vc/

After finding doom-emacs, I love that even more. Almost instant startup, non-broken magit key bindings, doom doctor etc. https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

It seems like doom-emacs is the new way to go. I feel quiet sad about this cause I spent some time to switch to Spacemacs and now I have to move to another emacs distro.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#32

Post by WanderPanda »

jwr wrote: post #11

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. Whe…

What is idiotic about the Touchbar that is not idiodic about function keys? You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys, why not use the glance for a visual feedback loop?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#33

Post by gpderetta »

globular-toast wrote: post #6
melling wrote: post #3

Emacs 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.

I think the reason that emacs feels fine most of the time even if elisp is slow is that usually abstractions are fairly minimal.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#34

Post by [deleted] »

skissane wrote: post #7

I 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 -batc…

[deleted]

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#35

Post by lawn »

5h wrote: post #8
melling wrote: post #3

Emacs 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?

I don't know the reason but for me Emacs is frustratingly slow compared to Vim.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#36

Post by codegladiator »

WanderPanda wrote: post #32
jwr wrote: post #11

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. Whe…

What is idiotic about the Touchbar that is not idiodic about function keys? You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys, why not use the glance for a visual feedback loop?

> You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys

No, you are doing it wrong. Never need to see keyboard except when using touchbar thanks to no feedback.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#37

Post by vbsteven »

To me the main 2 primitives that make Emacs the extensible crossplatform app/platform/os/whatever you want to call it are these:

* everything is a buffer, which in essence is a grid of text, that's the UI primitive, if you can render a grid of text you can probably build an emacs UI easily.

* every action/command is an elisp function that operates on these buffers

Combine these two and you can create pretty much anything. Code written in elisp that outputs buffers.

An analogy with the modern web as a platform: elisp is the JavaScript and buffers are the DOM.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#38

Post by zwirbl »

WanderPanda wrote: post #32
jwr wrote: post #11

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. Whe…

What is idiotic about the Touchbar that is not idiodic about function keys? You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys, why not use the glance for a visual feedback loop?

I barely, if ever, have to look at the function keys to hit right one

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#39

Post by antonios »

jwr wrote: post #11

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. Whe…

Sometime I also get in a pessimistic mood. I really would like to convince myself that X11 is not going away in the next decades.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#40

Post by sseneca »

DreamyCori wrote: post #30
smitty1e wrote: post #18

For those with wretched joints (me), Spacemacs[1] is a way to have all that org-mode[2] functionality, the joys of magit[3] and have it all work well over SSH. Leave all the icons to their fans. [1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/ [3] https://magit.vc/

Anyone is info about the release model of Spacemacs ? It seems like nothing is moving. Any news ?

The release model is a mess. Most people tend to stick with using Spacemacs on the `develop` branch, which means updating via `git pull --rebase` every so often as well as the inbuilt `SPC f e U`.

I've been using Spacemacs for around a year on the `develop` branch. For me it's fine, but for those who want a very stable experience I don't recommend it -- it does break sometimes.

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