Emacs is special regarding UIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#181

Post by sreevisakh » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

blauditore wrote: post #142

Slightly off-topic, but people here seem to like that stuff: The author has a personal website[0], which is a gem from the "old internet" - a wild mix of technical stuff, pet cat pictures, and some personal history. [0]: https://delysid.org

Very interesting! Made me curious about how a blind person codes (accessibility technology). Aside from that, I am also curious as to why you characterize the website as from the 'old internet'. It looks like a modern minimalist static site to me. Not what I would expect from a 90s site. What do you consider as the distinguishing features of old internet vs the modern version?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#182

Post by sreevisakh » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #23

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…

Emacs support of non-fixed width fonts is also pretty bad. My language Urdu is basically impossible to write on Emacs - or at least it was 5 years ago when I struggled with it a lot.

You should give it another try. My native script is also hard to render as fixed-width. But the latest Emacs seems to be doing well.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#183

Post by RMPR » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #178

RMPR wrote: post #170

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 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 acce…

https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil/blob/3f3b2fea87172f155e5f... It's defined in Evil (which Doom uses directly). Seems like you just need to figure out your bug.

Thanks for pointing this out, seems the "bug" is exclusively with org-mode, which is too bad because I don't usually need this feature outside of org-mode.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#184

Post by duckonomy » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

slightwinder wrote: post #138

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.

Multi-decade effort..wasn't that done by just 2-3 guys as an alternative attempt? Anyway, while elisp might not be the fastest language around, it's not the origin of all slowness in emacs. Crufted design is also a big culprit. The dated regex-machine is often mentioned as a big problem, making syntax highlighting especially painful.

Some people are saying that https://github.com/ubolonton/emacs-tree-sitter will eventually replace the default regexp-based font-lock for syntax highlighting. I'm personally testing it out and it's been great!

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#185

Post by mrspeaker » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #164

konjin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can post on hacker news from it too. Sent from eww.

Or Gnus. Sent from nnhackernews

There's also a pretty nifty dedicated hackernews-mode.

Sent from `M-x hackernews`.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#186

Post by lvh » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

hpfr wrote: post #91

laex wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lay…

Jethro moved from a custom init.el to Doom, though, not Spacemacs to Doom :)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#187

Post by thekyle » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #166

worik wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Currently the only way to run GUI apps in WSL is x forwarding.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#188

Post by jerf » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #166

worik wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gosh, the technology only lasted 36 years so far, and definitely has a few years left to go in it before it is "dead". What a striking condemnation that it only made it 40-ish years before being replaced.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#189

Post by tartoran » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

chillfox wrote: post #72

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?

Yes it does but the idea was that UI/UX has been in decline

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#190

Post by argb » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

One of the nice things about the terminal is that things stay consistent for decades or more - people are not chasing fashion trends all the time, as is happening with the Web and graphical UIs.

Nobody is being forced to use a particular style and color scheme and we don't have repeated redesigns which remove functionality for the sake of user friendliness or minimalism.