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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#71

Post by rusk »

skissane wrote: post #53
rusk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting ... has anybody tried a browser based (which is what I presume you mean by HTML) front end for emacs? EDIT - just to be clear, I'm talking about emacsclient, talking to a emacs server. Not an actual full blown emacs implementation that's just stupid.

I meant old-school pure HTML forms, not a HTML5 app with JavaScript+Canvas (or even wasm+Canvas). With the later, you could in principle compile GNU Emacs to JavaScript or wasm, using e.g. emscripten. (I don't know if anyone has succeeded in that yet, but I think it would be in principle achievable.) Old-school pure HTML forms actually has a lot conceptually in common with block mode terminals such as IBM 3270. The s…

No, I am specifically not talking about this. I'm actually not sure at this point what you mean - I have a vision of somebody communicating with an emacs backend via forms?

I'm just talking about a thin client, such as you typically use when you have emacs running as a server. You only have to manage text and windowing, and capturing user commands and communicating with the back end. These are the kind of things browsers are good at.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#72

Post by chillfox »

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…

Doesn’t Midnight Commander do pretty much everything Norton Commander did?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#73

Post by znpy »

hpfr wrote: post #62
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…

The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding…

> The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst.

Yes but sometimes you really need that and it's a life saver.

EDIT: I just remembered about LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) which many schools used to lower the TCO of computing infrastructure. That relied heavily on Xorg's network transparency. I wonder what will happen to LTSP

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#74

Post by sz4kerto »

hpfr wrote: post #62
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…

The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding…

That means no Linux GUI apps on Windows + WSL2. Sounds like a niche, but I see many devs using Windows + WSL2 + X forwarding to develop under Linux.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#75

Post by Amorymeltzer »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts her…

I've never been a vim user, but regarding keyboard shortcuts, there's Evil[1], which is fairly popular.

1: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#76

Post by hpfr »

rusk wrote: post #13
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…

Interesting ... has anybody tried a browser based (which is what I presume you mean by HTML) front end for emacs? EDIT - just to be clear, I'm talking about emacsclient, talking to a emacs server. Not an actual full blown emacs implementation that's just stupid.

Cloudmacs basically puts tty emacs in your browser:

https://github.com/karlicoss/cloudmacs

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#77

Post by welterde »

hpfr wrote: post #62
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…

The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding…

Until recently there was no real alternative to it though. I recently learned about waypipe, so it should be possible to run wayland applications remotely over SSH at last (not sure how well it works/performs, but it exists).

Granted there is also sixel and tek4014 support in xterm, but they are quite limited in what they can do and not too many applications have display frontends for that.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#78

Post by brabel »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts her…

> you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts here and there.

Agree, but I am extremely used to the trackpad and haven't used a mouse in years... because of its closeness to the keyboard (in pretty much any laptop) I can do things very quickly when I have no shortcut at hand... so much so that I only find it worthwhile to memorize a few shortcuts for the tools I use most (the terminal, IntelliJ IDEA, and a few for VS Code though I find their shortcuts terrible)... but it's unescapable that you'll need to use the mouse or trackpad sometimes, especially when not using your main tool (things like browsers, photo apps, even file managers unfortunately), so getting good at it I think is more useful than memorising a million shortcuts for a single tool.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#79

Post by mapolone »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts her…

For the keyboard shortcuts, there's ergo-emacs [1] a minor-mode that already rebinds most of the common shortcuts (open, copy/paste and so on).

Or, if you like vi(m), evil mode [2] should be good to go.

[1] https://ergoemacs.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#80

Post by laex »

hpfr wrote: post #70
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts her…

I feel like it’s pretty safe to say https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs mostly solves of these concerns for Vim users in 2020. If you really can’t spend any time learning a few help keys then I guess I can’t recommend anything, but you’re here commenting so I bet you have some time :). Seriously, check out Doom, whether you use neovim, Emacs, VS Code, or nano (Doom has quite good Emacs and CUA bindings as well). I…

Is Doom better than Spacemacs ?
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