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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#91

Post by hpfr »

laex wrote: post #80
hpfr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I would say the Emacs user mindshare has shifted somewhat to Doom. There are a lot of Doom fans on r/emacs now, and the Discord is huge compared to what it was. Many new contributors are cropping up. Even some developers of well-known packages, like org-roam, have switched to Doom. Take it from him, not me! https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/migrating_to_doom_emacs/

Compared to Spacemacs, which has complex abstraction layers over Emacs, Doom seems to be much lighter. It's easy to get into Emacs browsing Doom's modules. Plus, the BDFL model is serving Doom quite well since Henrik is a god-tier BDFL. He's constantly active and keeps Doom very focused on performance with sensible defaults and consistent programming style. Docs are a focus and are growing, and they're extremely comfortable to browse in Doom Emacs itself, as well as the Doom and Emacs source code of course.

None of this is meant to attack Spacemacs, it did and does much for Emacs, and many swear by it. But I would say Doom is better these days.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#92

Post by agumonkey »

blablablerg wrote: post #86
agumonkey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate org. I use emacs 25/7, I hate org. Something about it rubs me the wrong way, yet I use it but only the basic parts. I think it's that I can't wrap my head around the mental model of it, and since it encompasses 2000 topics (trees, timing, workflow, states, agenda, journaling, tagging) it's like a mountain of mud before my eyes.

Well you don't even have to understand it fully, that is what is great about it. What it is good for is that it gives you maximal freedom in organizing things the way you want. When I start out with a new org file, I just make lists and add functionality when needed. While with most other todo/organizing applications you tend to be forced in some framework. This is how you should organize, and when you want to deviat…

oh you're assuming that not using org means using another organizer[0].. I just stopped organizing :D

who knows, maybe one day I'll finally see the light

[0] and I fully agree that most systems are way less ergonomic than emacs

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#93

Post by worik »

hpfr wrote: post #82
znpy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern ope…

It was the original reason to invent X. Literally

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#94

Post by andreareina »

ormindo wrote: post #65
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 keybinds / setup time, I'd recommend either Spacemacs or Doom emacs. Spacemacs especially is meant to be quite newcomer friendly, with things like windows telling you "you pressed this key, here are the other keys you can press to complete the keybind sequence, and here's what they will do". As for full fledged IDEs, no, I don't think Emacs can pretend to replace those, but you can still make the Emacs experience…

If you didn't already know there's a command you can run to `find` files and put them in a dired buffer, then from there you can run an interactive regexp search/replace on all marked files. On mobile so I don't have the command names and key bindings available, but it's some combination of dired and find.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#95

Post by twic »

znpy wrote: post #73
hpfr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For terminal server use cases, there are things like VNC, SPICE, NX, etc. The X11/ssh thing is for when you want to run a mix of local and remote applications on a single desktop, which i think is pretty unusual these days.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#96

Post by linspace »

brnt wrote: post #88
Symbiote wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On any reasonable keyboard, the function keys are in groups of four (F1-F2-F3-F4 F5-F6-F7-F8 F9-F10-F11-F12), or sometimes three. It's not necessary to look to see where the keys are.

You're excluding pretty much every laptop there.

I don't find laptop keyboards reasonable. They are a last resort.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#97

Post by konjin »

andreareina wrote: post #87
dmortin wrote: post #46

Emacs is not a text editor, it's a platform independent VM which can run your scripts with a text UI. E.g. do you want keep an eye on some information which can be fetched from the net? You just write a script which regularly fetches the info and puts it into a buffer, so you can take a look at it anytime, and then regardless of platform you have that info readily available just by installing your own emacs config fi…

We've been joking about emacs being an OS for a long time. And it even reads email (still haven't set that up actually...)

You can post on hacker news from it too.

Sent from eww.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#98

Post by levosmetalo »

hpfr wrote: post #82
znpy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern ope…

Yet, many people use windows and I still miss X forwarding. RDP and VNC are just not a replacement for being able to start 3 different programs on 3 different remote computers, and have them all sitting together on screen next to each other.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#99

Post by hpfr »

fierarul wrote: post #12

I thought it will be a criticism how everything seems off with the Emacs GUI from the copy-paste to the font rendering to the way scrolling is done, etc. I'd guess it managed to be so cross-platform by re-implementing everything, kinda like Java Swing but with less care for design. Now I understand how having a scriptable and text-based foundation would help with accessibility, just Emacs wins no UI contest.

I don't know if I'd call it reimplementation when the original Emacs is older than DOS and GNU Emacs, still maintained today, is older than Windows (1985). Emacs's keybindings, font rendering, and scrolling were just as valid then as any other approach. Let's at least avoid comparisons to Swing :).

You can bind copy-and-paste as well as any other text wrangling functionality to whatever you want and there are ways to make it behave like other platforms without too much difficulty. But why hamstring Emacs' copy and paste by limiting it to the simplistic version we're used to when you can copy to multiple registers and have a searchable history of copied text?

Font rendering uses Harfbuzz in the latest version and is quite good in my opinion, there's even color emojis. Scrolling is certainly better than any terminal emulator I've used, although there's no smooth scrolling. I guess everything is off if you're comparing it to a browser, but modern browsers aren't exactly paragons of UX either. But if you're comparing prettiness options like these, yeah, Emacs loses to VS Code. All Microsoft had to do was build a text editor on top of a browser engine to get those features :). I'd say Emacs is more extensible, though. Lisp machines and all

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#100

Post by konjin »

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.

I've ran emacs in cocalc's terminal emulator in the browser, non-ironically doing real work.

It works pretty well.

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