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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#151

Post by u801e »

welterde wrote: post #119
twic wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really that unusual to do some data reduction/analysis on a beefy dedicated machine and wanting to look at the results right away using the same terminal instead of having to copy the result files or using a shared network file system? Even more important if it involves any graphical interactions. Sure, one could use a remote desktop to do same thing, but it's a bit annoying if all you want is one window from t…

> it's a bit annoying if all you want is one window from the remote machine.

You should try xrdp. It can work like X forwarding (single application window forwarding), but you can also attach or detach from a running application (like screen or tmux for X).

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#152

Post by pvg »

NateEag wrote: post #127
pvg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your intuition is about right: the IDE is going to squish all before it at the environments/runtimes it supports well, the vi(m) obsession with modal keyboard golf is a waste of time and org mode is a curious subcult of the the already weird (but, like, totally different from those vim heretics!) emacs cult. The other things are worth exploring for fun and curiosity but it's sensible to look at them as they a…

As a long-time evil-mode / emacs user, I would say your comment is pretty accurate. Two objections come to mind at the moment:: * vim keybindings have helped my RSI significantly (and before you go there, I got RSI when I was an IDE user, before I focused on on Emacs) * Using Emacs and building my own config has not made me massively more efficient at the workflow level, but it has taught me a great deal about softwa…

Oh I'm just snarking at 'modal text editing is some programming superpower'. I've had RSI scares and similarly odd change-of-habit relief.

As to the second thing, it occurred to me recently that my .emacs is old enough to vote and probably still contains bits of other people's .emacsen that were old enough to vote when I first edited it.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#153

Post by JoBrad »

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.

RemoteApp mode for RDP lets you interact with server-hosted apps like a client-hosted one. Also, I recall using apps with rdesktop in seamless mode, which worked pretty well.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-security-an...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#154

Post by indymike »

roydivision wrote: post #106
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…

> It's much easier to write such things in emacs than curating various different scripts in various languages (python, etc.) which all require their specific support which is either available or not. I disagree. I’ve been using Unix/Linux for 25 years, I’ve met maybe 1 or two people who know or use Emacs, whereas almost everyone knows enough to do some scripting. I’m also guessing that installing and configuring Emac…

Honestly, getting going with emacs:

$ sudo apt install emacs $ emacs

From there it's learning some keystrokes. Payback? Almost immediate. And you can use it to work with Python, or any other language. After that, maybe reading a couple of howtos and installing a few add-on packages and customizing your configuration. Payback? Almost immediate. It's really productive.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#155

Post by benreesman »

IMHO emacs is kind of a Rorschach test w.r.t. Lisp. Some people really like programming in Lisp, and for them getting emacs to do what they want is fun and rewarding, particularly but not exclusively regarding interface affordances. I personally fall into this category. The fact that it has very similar keybindings to readline/bash (especially important if you spend a lot of time popping on and off servers that don’t have your dots and thus choose not to customize the shell too much) and macOS is a huge bonus.

But I totally get that this is from outer space for another group. Vim is a great alternative for people who want a more opinionated editing wizard mode, and VSCode is really competent at interacting with remote filesystems and supporting lots of languages for the GUI crowd. It’s a great time to be editing text.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#156

Post by justaj »

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…

I don't know. People keep saying that Emacs can work nice in terminals, but there's a specific bot-macro in the #emacs channel on Freenode:

    : ,terminal
    fsbot [->] I heard terminals are [0] Terminals do weird thing to your keyboard input: http://catern.com/posts/terminal_quirks.html
    fsbot [1]  Terminals have limitations compared to the graphical windows; it's advisable to use "graphical" Emacs unless one has a good reason not to. See ,betterdefaults for disabling scroll bars, tool bars, etc.
    fsbot [2] https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/ ;;[ ,more / ,dump]

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#157

Post by MereInterest »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #148
levosmetalo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lockd…

RDP works well if you want to connect to a remote machine, then work only on that machine for a significant amount of time. For me, I need to switch in and out of several different RDP sessions, which is a nightmare. Alt tab works either within a session if full screened, or within the local computer if not full screened. That means I need to also periodically use ctrl alt break to switch between full screen and windowed.

In windowed mode, I can either have scrollbars to view a subsection, or I can scale the window. Doing the right thing, changing the size of the remote desktop when the local window is resized, isn't an option because that is set at connection time.

Sometimes, for firewall reasons, I need to have needed RDP sessions. At this point, everything performs poorly, and I need to drag the overlayed blue bars off of each other, then interact with one or the other.

I miss SSH, and want better support for it. Nested connections can be handled with SSH tunnels. Text connections are fast enough to do anything on the slowest of connections. If I need a GUI, I can open up a single window through X11, without additional setup with RemoteApp. Windows remote management through RDP is slow, clunky, error-prone, and inflexible by comparison.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#158

Post by II2II »

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…

The happens to exist bit turns out to be very important. I can login to a machine and run an X client without installing and configuring extra software on the server. If I am using a desktop with X installed (most *ix based systems), there is no extra software to install and configure on that end either. The worse case scenario is the necessity to install an X server on platforms like macOS and Windows.

The same sort of thing can be said for Remote Desktop. If you're using a version of Windows that includes it, it is wonderful to use because it is just there.

Which is better? It depends on how you're using it. I generally prefer Remote Desktop for my use case because it takes care of audio and it is easy to resume sessions. That being said, those features don't matter to me most of the time so X is just as useful.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#159

Post by GuB-42 »

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…

At work, we do X11 forwarding all the times. We have a wide variety of UNIX machines and we often need to run several graphical applications from different machines (not a remote desktop).

X11 forwarding works with the latest Linux distros as well a 20+ year old systems running motif apps. Note: the old systems are now virtualized but we still need them, I work in the aeronautic industry and these are the time scales we are working with.

I don't know of any replacement, at least not one with that level of adoption. Again, we really want to run graphical applications on a server, not a remote desktop.

And BTW, things are getting troublesome. More and more Linux apps integrate accelerated web browser components and these tend not to play well with X11 forwarding.

Love the irony of using a remote display to show an Electron app BTW.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#160

Post by hprotagonist »

roydivision wrote: post #106
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…

> It's much easier to write such things in emacs than curating various different scripts in various languages (python, etc.) which all require their specific support which is either available or not. I disagree. I’ve been using Unix/Linux for 25 years, I’ve met maybe 1 or two people who know or use Emacs, whereas almost everyone knows enough to do some scripting. I’m also guessing that installing and configuring Emac…

> I’m also guessing that installing and configuring Emacs is way more work than installing Python. And any gained Python knowledge will pay you back tenfold more than learning Emacs.

I’m a full-time python developer in the sciences and an emacs user and neither of those claims are true.

More’s the pity.

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