Emacs is special regarding UIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#271

Post by paledot » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

morelisp wrote: post #252

oblio wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I know you're angling for option 2 here, but honestly, default churn still sounds like the best choice. Don't like it? Have a one-line config Defaults=1980 and let people like my father-in-law keep using their Shift-Delete, while the rest of us can enjoy an editor that's at least usable out of the box.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#272

Post by wiz21c » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

roydivision wrote: post #106

dmortin wrote: post #46

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…

Compiling emacs oneself is certainly easy these days (I just tried a month ago, just to make sure of something and I was very happy to see that it's just as easy as it can get (install just a few dependencies et voilà))

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#273

Post by pmoriarty » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:25 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.

Apparently, Emacs' display code shares the blame, and no one wants to touch it as it's written in some really hairy legacy C.

Though I'm not a Rust fan, and would infinitely prefer Guile Emacs, I am kind of half-hoping Remacs succeeds so Emacs can finally put all of that legacy C behind it.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#274

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #163

II2II wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The happens to exist bit turns out to be very important. I can login to a machine and run an X client without installing and configuring extra software on the server. If I am using a desktop with X installed (most *ix based systems), there is no extra software to install and configure on that end either. The worse case scenario is the necessity to install an X server on platforms like macOS and Windows. The same sort…

Right, the shift away from X doesn't mean the death of using GUI apps remotely, it just means moving to a Remote Desktop model instead of telling apps that their render target is your X server through a tunnel.

What implementation of a remote desktop model currently exists for Wayland?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#275

Post by wiz21c » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

argb wrote: post #190

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.

This. Plugins deliver value much more than graphical design. I also often tell myself that working in emacs is exhausting because it displays only valuable information => my brain works 100% of the time when I'm in front of it :-)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#276

Post by morelisp » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

paledot wrote: post #271

morelisp wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I know you're angling for option 2 here, but honestly, default churn still sounds like the best choice. Don't like it? Have a one-line config Defaults=1980 and let people like my father-in-law keep using their Shift-Delete, while the rest of us can enjoy an editor that's at least usable out of the box.

> Have a one-line config Defaults=1980

You could bundle up maybe a dozen keybinds like this, but it's not going to scale to even address the complaints we see in this thread (window vs. frame terminology), let alone the full gamut of mainstream Emacs configuration. And it's a massive amount of work to do. And it's not fundamentally different than just picking an Emacs-distribution-du-jour (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) right now.

If that's what you want, my view is you might as well be churning whole editors. And truthfully, if that's what you want, do it! But I want a kill ring, and buffer/window management that doesn't presuppose multiple frames, and my mode line. I don't want to waste critical keybindings like C-x or C-c on weaksauce single-buffered text operations. And yeah, there's a lot of things I would change if I was doing "Emacs from scratch", but on the other hand I don't need to because I can change them now, and easily share them, and still take advantage of what everyone else is doing.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#277

Post by taeric » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:34 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…

Your complaint on the documentation reads oddly. You do know there is a tutorial included, right? And, it mostly does what you are asking. You can even try to speed run through it occasionally to make sure you still remember everything.

The straight documentation on the parts? I'm curious how you would want those to be otherwise. They mostly read like the user's manual of a car. Fairly technical, but at a very high level. With occasional tips on how to use the part you are reading about.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#278

Post by pmoriarty » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

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

"I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt."

If we live long enough, each of us will almost certainly have accessibility issues.

So improving accessibility helps our future selves.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#279

Post by munificent » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

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

> Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well.

The generalization of this observation is called the curb-cut effect:

https://burness.com/blog/the-curb-cut-effect-how-a-fix-for-o...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#280

Post by u801e » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

welterde wrote: post #175

u801e wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a bit annoying if all you want is one window from the remote machine. You should try xrdp. It can work like X forwarding (single application window forwarding), but you can also attach or detach from a running application (like screen or tmux for X).

That's only really an alternative for long-running applications since it still seems quite tedious to do if I am not missing anything (with modifying initial_program and all). Right now the workflow is simply ssh -X machine and then run some scripts that may or may not open interactive windows and then look at the result files using some graphical application. The same as if I was running it locally really (except on…

I haven't tried all of the xpra options, but it would be a matter of starting an instance on the remote machine and then running the command to attach to it in the local machine.

I suppose that you could start a terminal session on the remote machine and spawn GUI applications from that. I'm not sure if xpra allows for a terminal session directly from the command line though.