Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emacs is special regarding UIs

lists.gnu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 418 posts

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#251

Post by newen »

Jtsummers wrote: post #209
fierarul wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand, but 35 years have passed, no need to stick to the original implementation that long. I'm a super basic user and nowadays basically have Emacs open all day just for org-mode. Nothing else. To me it seems a terrible text editor and has an UI that's foreign on macOS and Ubuntu. It's unclear to me under what OS/Window manager/etc Emacs fits right at home. It seems out of this world. I can imagine there may…

A reason to stick so closely to the original model is that it has lasted 35 years. There are few other programs that have lasted as long without feeling an urgency to change with the times, and mostly by the base system being similarly stubborn about changing or by being incredibly simple. The fact that it's, essentially, the same on every OS I use it on is another selling point. I bring my .emacs file and make minor…

Yep! Main reason I use emacs is that I can use just about the same workflow when I'm programming in python, C++, etc. in different environments like windows gui, windows WSL, linux GUI, linux terminal, remoting through ssh, ssh into docker container, etc.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#252

Post by morelisp »

oblio wrote: post #236
pmoriarty wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 custo…

> 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. You do know that there is a middle ground, right? Emacs itself could come with reasonable defaults. You'd still be able to customize it (after all, you probably did) and all…

> You do know that there is a middle ground, right? Emacs itself could come with reasonable defaults...

That's the rub though. Emacs could change its defaults, plan large deprecation and rename, rewrite all its documentation and write even more to help migrate. And 20 years from now someone will be whining about the 2010 "web arcana" embedded in some interface and command set.

> newbies wouldn't have to read about 80's computing arcana

Because here's the perfect example. Emacs isn't 80s computing arcana, it's 60s computing arcana largely encoded into it in the 70s. In the early 90s when I first picked it up there was a similar push to encode the arcana from the 80s instead. "Pick the standard keybinds that make sense!" they said. Like Shift-Delete for cut and Shift-Insert for paste!

... oh, that's probably not what you want today either, is it?

So here's your options:

- Churn the defaults and everyone's configs every 15ish years

- Document as best you can the defaults and how to change them, and make the best UIs you can at the time, in fashion or not. (Kill rings are still better than cut buffers!)

Universal "reasonable defaults" don't exist in a tool meant to last 50 years in an ecosystem of fads.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#253

Post by kej »

GuB-42 wrote: post #159
hpfr wrote: post #62

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. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding…

At work, we do X11 forwarding all the times. We have a wide variety of UNIX machines and we often need to run several graphical applications from different machines (not a remote desktop). X11 forwarding works with the latest Linux distros as well a 20+ year old systems running motif apps. Note: the old systems are now virtualized but we still need them, I work in the aeronautic industry and these are the time scales…

Idle curiosity: what kind of applications are these remote systems running? You mentioned the aeronautic industry but I'm not familiar enough with it to imagine the kinds of things you would need to run remotely.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#254

Post by sn41 »

dhosek wrote: post #213

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 presen…

It is an interesting historical note that T. V. Raman won the ACM best doctoral dissertation award as a blind scholar [1]. I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt. Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. [1] https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#255

Post by mercer »

pmoriarty wrote: post #218
agumonkey wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Whether it's 'hydras' or something similar, the single thing that got me into properly using Emacs was this feature in Spacemacs. For almost any situation, I can either pull up the spacebar 'global' menu, or a context-specific quick-menu. Discoverability has been insanely good, and I keep finding new tricks just by exploring the various menus that pop up.

I wish 'UI autocomplete' like this was a standard feature of operating systems. GUI's aside, how nice would it be to run a CLI command with some flag that allows you to explore the various options and string them together, rather than reading the manpage and searching for whatever flag you might want to use?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#256

Post by krageon »

rusk wrote: post #206
NateEag wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirement to advertise "we use cookies" and spam you with popups when you visit a site is frustrating for highly technical users. OP is saying that Emacs-as-website would be frustrating if it had those popups.

You don’t have to do that unless you’re hosting a public site ... and even so if it’s a private session and you’d logged in this wouldn’t be required. Logging in is seen as a tacit acknowledgment that you consent to being tracked, cause how would I have. A personal session otherwise. The cookies warning is all about notifying the casual reader who might otherwise believe they were passively browsing static content.

> Logging in is seen as a tacit acknowledgment that you consent to being tracked

Logging in means you get a single cookie (a login/session cookie), that cookie is necessary and thus a functional cookie that you can't say no to. All other cookies (and basically every form of tracking) still isn't allowed without consent.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#258

Post by mercer »

sn41 wrote: post #254
dhosek wrote: post #213

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 presen…

It is an interesting historical note that T. V. Raman won the ACM best doctoral dissertation award as a blind scholar [1]. I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt. Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. [1] https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221

in my late teens and early twenties my wrists started hurting so bad that I could barely use a computer.

While over time things improved to the point where I only have pain after doing pixel-style photoshop work with a mouse, it made me painfully aware of easy it is to take things for granted and not consider accessibility.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#259

Post by iandinwoodie »

WanderPanda wrote: post #32
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…

What is idiotic about the Touchbar that is not idiodic about function keys? You have to look at your keyboard to hit the function keys, why not use the glance for a visual feedback loop?

With regard to accessibility, a blind user can reliably use the function keys due to their physical separation. In contrast, the Touch Bar removes the separation of individual keys and may pose a challenge to sight restricted users.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#260

Post by HelloNurse »

robenkleene wrote: post #84

What's the difference between what's being described here and the web? (In particular, Electron-based local applications which of course have a cross-platform web-based UI.) I'm not saying they aren't different, at the very least, Emacs prioritizes text, while the web prioritizes multimedia. But I'd love to hear other peoples takes on the differences.

"Prioritizes"? It's a fundamental difference. If everything is text, text processing can process everything; if everything is a blob with a MIME type user experience is fragmented into whatever more or less integrated clients are able and willing to do with each incoming document (usually not much).
Post reply on HN