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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#291

Post by voldacar »

pmoriarty wrote: post #208
swiley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really honestly don’t like X11. I’ve poked around in the source a couple times and it confuses and scares me. I love the idea of moving entirely to just one graphics API and keeping the server simple. Until wayland has decent performance though I don’t think I’ll ever switch. None of the apps I use are native (except possibly Firefox and some EDA tools but only if gtk is set up right?) I thought my new phone would…

"I love the idea of moving entirely to just one graphics API and keeping the server simple" I'm all for that, if and only if Wayland doesn't force me to give up what I consider to be important features of X. Apart from the aforementioned remote access, a post titled "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet"[1] goes in to some requirements that I also find important: - Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, ara…

Performance too. Wayland adds at least one extra frame of latency and so is unsuitable for gaming and similar scenarios where one program needs to monopolize the framebuffer

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#292

Post by bartread »

taeric wrote: post #277
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 l…

> 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.

But that's the point: it doesn't.

Maybe it does if you want to invest a few hours getting up and running, but I don't have that kind of time: I need to get stuff done now.

I'm not saying I'm too important, or my time is too valuable, or any nonsense like that: I just don't have time to invest in spending a day or even half a day learning what are in contemporary times the basics of using a text editor.

And that's the problem with the tutorial: it doesn't start with a quick two page summary of what, in contemporary times, are considered the basics of using a text editor. It's long-winded and academic and takes way too long to get to the point on any and all relevant topics.

The result is that I have to (and not just me: anybody used to non-emacs - or perhaps vim - editors) invest non-insignificant amounts of time learning basic functionality that works in a common way across most other editors and IDEs (IDEA, Visual Studio, Rider, VS Code, Sublime, TextPad, XCode - heck, even Microsoft Word) and learn completely different paradigms for all of it just because emacs is "special". It's pretty frustrating because for me the editor is not the point. I'm only looking at emacs at all because a lot of editors, once you get to a project of any size, become absolute CPU hogs and it starts to get in the way. But given the grief I may come to the conclusion that a better investment is just to buy a faster laptop.

I'm totally happy to be proven, or to prove myself, wrong, but right now the whole emacs ecosystem seems unnecessarily, contrarily alien simply for the sake of it.

There also seems to be a strong lack of empathy for users. Few influential people seem to have given any consideration as to how to make the software accessible for newcomers. In this day and age that's almost laughable.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#293

Post by BeetleB »

jonfw wrote: post #171
indymike wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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

Let's take these claims one by one:

> you have to learn the models it works in

I read a book on Emacs and practiced along all within one week. At the end of the week, I was doing more with it than with any of the previous text editors I used.

Indeed, my desire to learn Emacs was explicitly to replace the other editors I was using - and I succeeded. Over the subsequent weeks, every time I encountered a situation where I said "Oh, I wish the feature I used in editor X existed in Emacs", a quick Google search told me how to set it up for Emacs.

> a new programming language

I was a power Emacs user for over 9 years before I learned Emacs Lisp. Clearly wrong claim.

> and then there are a LOT of keystrokes

While I'll admit you get more productive the more you learn, for most of those 9 years I did not know many keystrokes. Instead, you do M-x and the command. With completion systems like ido (the "simplest" of the powerful completion systems), you can quickly find the desired command just by guessing what it will be named.

I only started learning lots of keystrokes recently, using flashcard software. And even with that, I stopped after about a year once I learned how to use hydra.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#294

Post by I_complete_me »

detaro wrote: post #140
john4532452 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not find that in urban dictionary or google results.Is this commonly used in free software or open software mailing lists or did you just guessed it ?

OT for "Off-topic" is a very common abbreviation online, yes.

Is there a common abbreviation online for On-topic? If so, what is it?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#295

Post by tokenrove »

hpfr wrote: post #82
znpy wrote: post #73

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. Yes but sometimes you really need that and it's a life saver. EDIT: I just remembered about LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) which many schools used to lower the TCO of computing infrastructure. That relied heavily on Xorg's network transparency. I wonder what will happen to LTSP

Honestly, I think people's reliance on X forwarding is just due to the fact that it happens to exist, not because they really need it. There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge. If X forwarding didn't exist people would have figured out how to do what they needed over SSH with text or when GUI's are irreplaceable sysadmins would have set up an actual remote desktop solution like on other modern ope…

No, it was the need for this on Windows that made Citrix all its money.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#296

Post by oblio »

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…

Yeah, but here's the thing. Recently geneticists had to start renaming genes because Excel would parse the gene names as dates. And Excel is supposed to be "software".

At a certain critical mass, soft-ware stops being soft. Other things bend to accommodate the soft-ware.

You know what's even harder than hard soft-ware? Social mores and expectations. For example, such as those formed by millions upon millions of spreadsheet users.

Or billions and billions of web users.

So, where am I going with this? Emacs has encoded some norms from the 60s when the tech community was probably 0.1% of what it is now, and when large numbers of those 0.1% people were technically adept and very flexible in adopting new things.

"Web arcana" has been assimilated by a million more applications and systems than those systems that inspired Emacs had. It has also been assimilated by billions (!) of people.

60s arcana is not equivalent to web arcana, for this reason.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#297

Post by morelisp »

oblio wrote: post #296
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…

Yeah, but here's the thing. Recently geneticists had to start renaming genes because Excel would parse the gene names as dates. And Excel is supposed to be "software". At a certain critical mass, soft-ware stops being soft. Other things bend to accommodate the soft-ware. You know what's even harder than hard soft-ware? Social mores and expectations. For example, such as those formed by millions upon millions of sprea…

Yeah, sorry, you're right. Now is definitely the end of history and time to rewrite everything into the dominant paradigm.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#298

Post by BeetleB »

taeric wrote: post #277
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 l…

> Your complaint on the documentation reads oddly. You do know there is a tutorial included, right?

The tutorial covers only the very basics. It's less than 1% of the material in the manual. And I definitely agree with him - most Emacs manuals (whether for Emacs or for some packages) are written more as reference manuals than something to learn from. If you're lucky some of them will have a tutorial in the beginning.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#299

Post by oblio »

tzs wrote: post #264
oblio wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, you need AutoCAD (or equivalent) to be a productive engineer in certain fields. You don't need Emacs or Vim to be an incredibly successful software engineer. It's actually the opposite, Emacs and Vim users are a minority among successful software engineers. So they are only a specific kind of power tool. More than that, they can't even handle the "ridiculously complicated". Common examples are trying to…

Yes, you don't need Emacs or Vim to be a successful software engineer. If you are good enough you don't need anything more than a basic editor, a compiler/interpreter for a language, and libraries for that language that let it talk to whatever you need to do I/O with. But using a more advanced editor can make it easier. If you are going to be doing software engineering for a few decades all the times you have to do s…

You've misunderstood me. I'm not arguing that Notepad + msc.exe are more powerful than Emacs or Vim.

I'm arguing that IntelliJ/Visual Studio are more powerful than Emacs or Vim.

The Emacs and Vim architectures are antiquated and the volume of effort put into developing them (and their ecosystems) are outclassed by modern IDEs, especially for languages that scale to large numbers of developers working together (Java, C#). Emacs and Vim are poor man's IDEs compared to actual IDEs for these cases.

Emacs and Vim are mostly popular amongst C/C++ developers, where the ecosystems are generally baroque, forced by the need to integrate with embedded systems with limited toolchains or with libraries/frameworks that are very limited, and amongst developers working with dynamic languages, where you generally have small teams. Or large teams and a ton of headaches :-)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#300

Post by oblio »

morelisp wrote: post #297
oblio wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but here's the thing. Recently geneticists had to start renaming genes because Excel would parse the gene names as dates. And Excel is supposed to be "software". At a certain critical mass, soft-ware stops being soft. Other things bend to accommodate the soft-ware. You know what's even harder than hard soft-ware? Social mores and expectations. For example, such as those formed by millions upon millions of sprea…

Yeah, sorry, you're right. Now is definitely the end of history and time to rewrite everything into the dominant paradigm.

So it's better if the end of history was the 60s, when there were 10000 programmers, in total, worldwide?

When we hadn't even standardized the keyboard layout and the "display" was a dot matrix printer? When there was no networking to speak of?

How does that make more sense?

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