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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#241

Post by boogies »

jwr wrote: post #202
boogies wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nowhere near where Norton Commander was in terms of usability. Some of that is because of platform restrictions (terminal and keyboard access limitations) and some because of a difference in philosophy. Norton Commander was simple, but it got the simple things right.

I don’t understand what you’re talking about — my terminal accesses as much from my keyboard as I’ve ever wanted it to, and everything I can imagine it wanting to short of flashing my (Num|Caps|Scroll) lock lights or something (and other terminals support more features than I even use, eg. image previews in ranger et. al.) Could you give an even more specific and concrete example?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#242

Post by msla »

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…

> where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications

Plus the death of all non-mainstream window managers, it seems.

Realistically, I'm not moving away from X11 if it will create a UI regression for me. This means that unless I can get Window Maker and application forwarding, I'm not moving to Wayland, and I doubt I'm alone in this general feeling, even though other people use different window managers.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#243

Post by rgrau »

agumonkey wrote: post #60
submeta wrote: post #59

Emacs + org has the potential to be the dream environment for everybody with a hacker mindset: Automate everything that has to do with text: Journaling, writing todo lists, parsing your Kindle highlights file (`My Clippings.txt'), writing project outlines, doing web research and saving your searches, notes, thoughts, summaries in Emacs via org-capture, drafting papers in org-mode, creating (text-based) tables and ove…

I hate org. I use emacs 25/7, I hate org. Something about it rubs me the wrong way, yet I use it but only the basic parts. I think it's that I can't wrap my head around the mental model of it, and since it encompasses 2000 topics (trees, timing, workflow, states, agenda, journaling, tagging) it's like a mountain of mud before my eyes.

I feel ya, my friend.

I also have read the org manual a few times, and it feels so big you can't hold a mental model for long enough to make sense while incorporating all its features. As you know, org mode has too many features to use them all at once (like emacs itself).

What (kinda) worked for me was, after knowing "I've read it all", to purposefully "downgrade" to a very very basic workflow. I thought then I would start adding features on a need basis, because I had the perimeter of what it can do.

But it turns out I haven't added anything else to the trivial workflow. There's a bit more info here ( https://puntoblogspot.blogspot.com/2018/12/3-basic-org-agend...), but essentially the trick was to use just one capture template for everything that just schedules the current task for today (so it appears in agendas until I mark it as done), and one single file, without different subtrees.

       ("t" "Todo" entry (file+headline "~/org/tasks.org" "Tasks")
    "* %^{title} \n  SCHEDULED:%t\n  %?\n %i\n  %a\nAdded: %U")
I feel safe because in that file, down means "later", so I still can rely on my basic common sense.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#244

Post by jerf »

pmoriarty wrote: post #227
jerf wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using Emacs without knowing eLisp is like owning a race car but always driving it in first gear.

I can deal with that metaphor, if "a race car in first gear" is still faster than a lot of other cars.

Plus, it's the same race car. I've programmed half-a-dozen languages quite seriously in emacs, and I'm not changing editors the whole time. So, while I may not know elisp, I do know a fair amount about emacs and don't have to relearn how to do a lot of things in a new IDE every three years... or, worse yet, discover that entire features are missing because "nobody" has ever used an editor that had them. (I'm not sure I could live without macros of some sort in an editor.)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#245

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

jwr wrote: post #202
boogies wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nowhere near where Norton Commander was in terms of usability. Some of that is because of platform restrictions (terminal and keyboard access limitations) and some because of a difference in philosophy. Norton Commander was simple, but it got the simple things right.

What exactly was so useable about norton commander? I tried a split fm and I just found it cumbersome.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#246

Post by anthk »

tikhonj wrote: post #9
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.

There's some new development going on that compiles Emacs Lisp to native code with GCC and it is a real performance improvement. I've been using it on an unstable Emacs build for the past few weeks and I can feel the difference—noticeably snappier and more satisfying. It's not 100% ready for day-to-day use yet—the deferred compilation logic seems to be recompiling more often than it has to—but I've been quite happy w…

Also Emacs can lock the rest of the panes while doing I/O.

How could native code solve that?

Guile at least could.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#247

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

msla wrote: post #242
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…

> where the shift away from X11 means no more remote applications Plus the death of all non-mainstream window managers, it seems. Realistically, I'm not moving away from X11 if it will create a UI regression for me. This means that unless I can get Window Maker and application forwarding, I'm not moving to Wayland, and I doubt I'm alone in this general feeling, even though other people use different window managers.

Define mainstream. Most tilling wm we all know have a wayland branch now. Some abandonware will probably be lost but nothing prevents anyone from re-implementing them.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#248

Post by morelisp »

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #240
joosters wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

;;; 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)

Dude, `M-x custom-set-variable RET confirm-kill-emacs RET TAB`

Or just unbind it, you won't typo `M-x kill-emacs`...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#249

Post by shawnz »

slightwinder wrote: post #226
shawnz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too... 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 lin…

Sure it does. First of all, you can lay text anywhere you want in a buffer, thus letting you create whatever little boxes you want. Plus, it has support for images and even arbitrary GTK widgets in that buffer too.

Remember before CSS, people just did the same thing anyway with tables. CSS only made easier what people were already doing. I am sure the same would happen to Emacs if it ever became a widely used piece of software.

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