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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#161

Post by RMPR »

dmortin wrote: post #112
roydivision wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 meant the case when you have to use an other machine and naturally emacs users want to use emacs even there, so that's given. But on Windows, for example, python may not be installed, so that's an extra install, while if you have your usual scripts in emacs then it's just a matter of installing one's emacs config which one does anyway. I use python too when it's the less hassle. E.g. when parsing a page with Beatif…

> But on Windows, for example, python may not be installed

Actually Python is not a very good example since Windows now includes python and python3 commands by default[0]

0: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-in-the-windows-...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#162

Post by oblio »

boogies wrote: post #141
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... ?

Midnight Commander is not covered by the "nostalgia clause" :-)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#163

Post by Spivak »

II2II wrote: post #158
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…

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…

Right, the shift away from X doesn't mean the death of using GUI apps remotely, it just means moving to a Remote Desktop model instead of telling apps that their render target is your X server through a tunnel.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#164

Post by jimmyvalmer »

konjin wrote: post #97
andreareina wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or Gnus.

Sent from nnhackernews

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#165

Post by oblio »

II2II wrote: post #158
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…

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…

> 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.

Doesn't every Windows include it? I can't remember the last time I used a version of Windows that didn't have it, it must have been 20 years ago.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#166

Post by oblio »

worik wrote: post #93
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…

It was the original reason to invent X. Literally

And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles...

MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#167

Post by chriswarbo »

twic wrote: post #95
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

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.

> For terminal server use cases, there are things like VNC, SPICE, NX, etc.

Great. Which of those, if any, do you think might be installed on the machines I want access to?

Which of those, if any, do you think might be installed on the machines I want access from?

What do you think are the odds that the intersection of those is non-empty?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#168

Post by sreevisakh »

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…

In the past, I have used Emacs and then switched to Neovim. I just switched back to Emacs again. I am enjoying both - without any friction. To get the best out of both Emacs and (Neo)Vim, you have to treat them as different types of software.

> For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn

That's a valid concern. But if there was one keybinding every programmer should learn, it's probably Vim's. And while emacs has a default keybinding, it is not tied to it. Vim keybindings using evil-mode uses the same elisp interface as the default binding. Evil-mode feels very native and at par with Vim user experience. (Kakoune's bindings are derived from Vim's and is said to be better. But it's immature now. Hope it catches on.)

Emacs is a programming platform and not an editor as such. You should simply forget the key bindings (use what you are comfortable with- evil or even the Windows bindings) and focus on what the platform has to offer. Packages like Org-mode, Magit, restclient and a lot of others have no other alternatives. Emacs GUI also acts like a terminal emulator far more advanced than VT-100 emulators.

(Neo)vim is useful as an editor when you are setting up new systems or administering via SSH. Emacs is useful as a personal programming environment. With evil-mode, there will be no problem using either in the respective context.

> Second, it feels like you have to spend a lot of time to set it all up.

I support what everyone else recommends. Start with Doom Emacs or Spacemacs if you are a beginner. It does take a lot of time to set it up from scratch. I just prefer to set up everything from scratch, since I use a dotfiles repo. Improvements in configuration are incremental when you have a dotfiles repo.

> Third, will it replace an IDE?

All those are available. Just needs configuration. Or else, use Doom Emacs or Spacemacs - they come pre-configured. That really isn't the reason Emacs uses love it. It's those features you can't get in an IDE. If you have a task for which you need to switch out of an IDE, elisp makes it easy to integrate into emacs. The package repositories are full of such packages.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#169

Post by jimmyvalmer »

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…

> like the key bindings for switching ... being far too similar and easy to confuse for a newbie.

You must be referring to `C-x b` vs. `C-x C-b`. I remember getting apoplectic over this in 1995. I remain aggrieved to this day.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#170

Post by RMPR »

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…

> 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

I use both doom emacs and neovim, and I'd say: not really, at least not for me, there are some Vim features evil doesn't emulate properly, or at least it doesn't work like in Vim. Off the top of my head, I write in many languages, but absolutely hate the US international keyboard for accented characters, guess what? Vim has built-in support for digraph[0] by using Ctrl-k and iirc this is a motion keyboard shortcut in emacs, and since I like and use org-mode a lot, I'm always frustrated when I have to type in another language. Another one was with the various Terminal emulators packages in emacs, although this one was solved recently[1], whereas in (neo)vim it works flawlessly ootb.

0: https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Entering_special_characters

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24243031

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