221–230 of 418 posts
So tell me about the UX of free software speech recognition in emacs. I want to read about how to set that up and the limitations of it as I watch my 5 year-old niece interact with Alexa.
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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.
> 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
The people who Emacs will please most are power users who are willing to put in the time to learn it and configure it to their liking.
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…
This is a long, gentle transition. Although I believe it to be possible, I still haven't ever run a pure-Wayland system. Most graphical applications for Linux still need an X server, and Wayland provides one. Under sway, I can still run ssh -Y and start X clients on the host I'm connected to. This works just fine. It's going to be years until Wayland kills off X11 on the wire, and alternatives are already under development. I worry about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.
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…
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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.
With love, The Chrome Team
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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…
You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too... it's just that Emacs is not as widely used as the Web and its users don't have such varying demands and use cases for it, so it's not as common for that to happen. The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text. The Web also provides opportunities to make navigation semantics clear. The Web also implicitly supports keyboard navigation everyw…
If you do it on purpose, then maybe, but not to the degree of what webstack offers. People already have a hard time to handle org-mode-hierachies and folding...
> The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text.
No, that went out the door when CSS was added. Now it's designed around random positioning of little boxes. Some boxes contain linear text, some contain media, most contain even more little boxes.
Emacs does not have those boxes in the first place. The only boxes it has are outside the document, avoiding this whole class of problems for accesability.
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> 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…
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The release model is a mess. Most people tend to stick with using Spacemacs on the `develop` branch, which means updating via `git pull --rebase` every so often as well as the inbuilt `SPC f e U`. I've been using Spacemacs for around a year on the `develop` branch. For me it's fine, but for those who want a very stable experience I don't recommend it -- it does break sometimes.
This unclear release strategy sends a bad signal to the community and pushes people to doom-emacs. Sad to see ...
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…
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…
> t'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. Not in my experience. I much prefer to use the simpler acme / plan9 way, where I am free to use the language I prefer or that is better suited for the job. Same for vscode, atom, etc. Vim and neovim are halfway between th…