Emacs is special regarding UIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#211

Post by joosters » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #131

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…

As a long time emacs user, I can confirm that emacs is terrible... and everything else out there is deficient. I can write custom code (ew, elisp) to determine how to switch between buffers (test buffer and code under test) and I can run my tests and find operations and the like in a first class buffer and a dozen things like that which are just incredibly painful in other editors. Also I hit Cx-c by mistake thrice a…

  ;;; Make it more difficult to kill emacs accidentally
  (defun my-kill-emacs ()
    "Confirm before 'save-buffers-kill-emacs'."
    (interactive)
    (if (y-or-n-p "Really kill Emacs? ")
        (save-buffers-kill-emacs)
      (message "Aborted")
      )
    )
  (global-set-key "\C-x\C-c" 'my-kill-emacs)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#212

Post by gkya » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #197

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…

Org mode is the only reason I use Emacs. Nothing comes close to Org mode. Actually, I'd say that I use Org mode, and I use Emacs only incidentally because Org mode requires it. Because I used Org mode, for awhile I tried to switch my other text editing to Emacs. But without a good mode, it's not worth using Emacs. I do all my other text editing in Vim.

Something like Org mode is only possible in something like Emacs tho.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#213

Post by dhosek » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

Wow, it's interesting how many people seem to have their own takeaways from this, many of which seem to have missed the original point of the post (I wonder how many actually read the post). The author of the post on gnu.org is blind (and the "Raman" he referred to is T. V. Raman, a blind mathematician who I met ages ago when he gave a presentation at the Portland TeX Users Group meeting about adapting TeX for presenting mathematics to blind readers. Raman, in fact, wrote a reply to the message where he wrote:

>A lot of baggage gets applied today when folks talk about "Accessibility", but to me the touch-stone of a truly Accessible system is one where you dont have to ask what interaction modality someone else is using e.g. witness email, where the persons participating in a conversation never need ask "Did the person I am talking to use Braille, speech, or something else", similarly, someone who has a hearing impairment can send you email without you ever needing to know that he cant hear you.

I feel like too many developers treat accessibility as an afterthought rather than a central concern.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#214

Post by pmoriarty » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

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…

Yes, the Emacs defaults tend to be pretty awful, but you can configure it your liking, given enough time and effort.

I've put in a ton of time and effort configuring Emacs (after spending about 25 years on vim and vi), and though it took a long time, the results have been well worth it for me.

There's no way I would give that up and go to something with more reasonable defaults but which is much more limited in customization capabilities and which lacks a Lisp ecosystem which has been improved by thousands of people for many decades.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#215

Post by jrm4 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

sildur wrote: post #129

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.

Wheelchair users are also pretty unusual and we don’t go removing ramps from everywhere. I’m growing pretty tired of the “your use case is unusual, so fuck you” argument.

Despite having felt this way about so many things, I have never seen this argument put so well and succinctly. I am going to be using this ALL THE TIME.

Also, is this "sildur" of Minecraft shader fame? If so, much thanks, you've given me and my daughter many instances of "ooh pretty look at our house."

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#216

Post by joosters » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #193

jonfw wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From there it's learning some keystrokes Learning Emacs is VERY clearly not this trivial... to use Emacs to any extent where it's more useful than it's competitors, you have to learn the models it works in, a new programming language- and then there are a LOT of keystrokes

I... uh... am almost in some sense ashamed to admit this, but I've been using emacs for about 23 years now, and I still don't program elisp. I can just about diagnose errors in my not-very-complicated .emacs with a bit of googling, and that's about it. I've read about it, and I understand the basics, but I know nothing about the APIs and have no experience in it past one-liners. It probably is a good idea to learn it…

Same here, but not ashamed about it at all. If there's something I need to automate or change in emacs, it's just a web search away and I can find the elisp that I need to add into my config files.

I'd consider myself an advanced user of emacs, but that still doesn't mean that I have any motivation to write any new emacs modes or functions, since just about everything I could ever want already exists!

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#217

Post by lallysingh » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

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.

Thinkpads group their function keys. Who outside apple doesn't?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#218

Post by pmoriarty » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #143

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 co…

I'm a huge, huge, huuuge fan of hydras.

They're a big part of what make Emacs useable for me.

I have set up hydras for pretty much every major mode I use (except magit, which kind of has its own hydra-like menu system).

Because of hydras, I don't have to remember all the arcane keyboard shortcuts these modes have bound by default, and don't have to look up how to run a function that's not bound at all.

All I have to remember is one keyboard shortcut which I have configured to bring up a hydra in every mode, and it'll show me a menu of everything I can do in that mode.

This is really fantastic, has revolutionized the way I use Emacs, and has made it 10 times as useable for me as it was before I used hydra.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#219

Post by aliceryhl » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

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…

Regarding RSI, I find vim keybinds critical for voice-based interaction with a computer. It really makes a large difference when it hears the wrong thing.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#220

Post by II2II » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:44 PM UTC

Most of the comments seem to be missing a very important point from the post:

> As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something specific, say, implement an IRC client. Almost all my work can instantaneously be used by sighted people using their graphical toolkit.

This goes well beyond the ability of the author to create software that is accessible for both sighted and blind users. It is stating that support for both audiences is handled elegantly by the same toolkit, so you aren't creating an adversarial situation where serving the needs of both groups of people requires some form of compromise in the user interface or necessitating significantly more effort. (I would imagine that some care is required, but Emacs developers are going to address it anyhow since the program is intended to run in graphical and non-graphical environments.)

I suspect this support of multiple environments is part of the reason why there is an esoteric collection of applications that run within Emacs. As an example: it is possible to read ebooks in Emacs, with formatting and images being supported in X and gracefully handled in a terminal.