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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#141

Post by boogies »

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…

> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool

What’s the problem with Midnight Commander and/or the 23 other programs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander#Norton_Comman... ?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#143

Post by agumonkey »

bartread wrote: post #123

This is somewhat oblique to the content of the post but "special" is about right. "Unnecessarily obtuse", particularly from a contemporary perspective, might be a less kind way to describe it. I could say the same about the documentation which, frankly, is not great at making you immediately productive. It's written like an academic treastise, not a tutorial for a piece of software that exists to help you get stuff d…

It might be the right timing for an ergonomic revamp. As much as I like the old habits, I agree that some parts really need to be rebalanced. And emacs is moving faster these days so maybe a mutation can happen

A slightly nicer embedded docs. They were great for 80s way of life, but it could use a slightly more reply (to stay in the context of a live editor / lisp machine). Maybe a text demo system.. after all you could script a demo of workflows in elisp for newcomers to see rapidly.

- hydras could be extremely useful for newcomers for instance (and I'm no fan, but it cuts the chase by a factor of 1000)

- ace-jump

I don't know, I'm just suggesting

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#144

Post by LandR »

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.

My experience on windows is that emacs is unusably slow.

Multi-second lag on type and navigating isn't acceptable. Org-mode is especially bad.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#145

Post by agumonkey »

tikhonj wrote: post #9
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.

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 w…

What's your machine specs ?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#146

Post by mullikine »

I wish to profess my love for terminal emacs. I do not take it for granted. Hear ye. Any editor so powerful that also humbles itself to a 100x30 terminal without losing any power is pure class. This program deserves praise. I pray that GNU emacs will continue to support a text-only interface for many years to come and when at last the elisp fractal is no longer fit for purpose, I pray that its mechanics will be absorbed by the great neural network that will learn everything.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#147

Post by u801e »

levosmetalo wrote: post #98
hpfr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should look into xrdp. It's like X forwarding, but with the ability to detach and reattach to a running application like screen or tmux.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#148

Post by vladvasiliu »

levosmetalo wrote: post #98
hpfr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically, RDP allows you to only launch one application as opposed to a whole desktop. They call that RemoteApp.

That you can't just launch that on every machine you want (in particular non server installs) is more a limitation of Microsoft's licensing model than of the protocol itself.

For me, from a usability point of view, RDP runs circles around the other solutions. I've used this fairly often during the lockdowns and even over a shitty DSL connection there was close to no lag.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#149

Post by rleigh »

Some of its paradigms are plain stupid.

C-Z (in the GUI) triggers minimise of the window.

In a shell, that's fine. It suspends the process. In a GUI it is just bloody annoying. There's a perfectly good minimise button if I want it. This is just a frustration every time I fat-finger C-X. Which is used so frequently it's just asking to be pressed by accident.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#150

Post by slightwinder »

robenkleene wrote: post #84

What's the difference between what's being described here and the web? (In particular, Electron-based local applications which of course have a cross-platform web-based UI.) I'm not saying they aren't different, at the very least, Emacs prioritizes text, while the web prioritizes multimedia. But I'd love to hear other peoples takes on the differences.

The Webstack is far more complex than anything emacs offers. Emacs has just a wall of text with some special markup, but there is not concept of layout for this text, and all navigation is usually separate from the wall of text, making accesability significant simpler to handle.

In emacs there is a beginning and an end, and you just follow the flow. In webstack you have elements, which have a position and if you are lucky they are tagged with their purpose. If not, it's up to you to figure out whether this is for navigation or content or advertisement or some other navigation or comments, which is more another kind of navigation... Basically there is just no really realiable structure with the web. Sometimes there is something, sometimes not, sometimes it's this way, next week it can be that way...

And even worse are dynamic site where parts of the site are loaded on demand. So you need a complex setup of tools to handle those content, instead of simple text-search and cursor-moving.

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