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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#301

Post by BeetleB »

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…

Agree on the referenciness of the manuals. They are not the best way to learn when new to it (or to a package).

C-x 4 is a prefix for "other window".

C-x 5 is a prefix for "other frame"

(It's OK if you did not know this. I was a heavy Emacs user for a decade before I learned this).

For your particular problem, you may want to look into Hydra. Setting up your own Hydra for dired-mode will involve some basic Elisp, but not much - you can just copy/paste from elsewhere. However, you may need to write an Elisp function for your particular situation, and then have the Hydra call that function.

Similar to another commenter, once I learned hydra, I create my own menus for every new mode I want to use. Much easier than memorizing keybindings, and you can put your own custom stuff there.

Also, I rebound F6 to switching windows. C-x o would drive me nuts. F6 is the standard in Windows/DOS, so that's what I was used to (I still use it in Outlook for work to avoid the mouse).

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#302

Post by pmoriarty »

voldacar wrote: post #291
pmoriarty wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

Is that extra latency an inherent limitation of how Wayland is designed, or could future optimizations improve Wayland so that its performance is on par with X?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#303

Post by BeetleB »

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.

Dude: It's just a simple outliner with features built on top of it. There's not much of a mental model beyond the outline aspect (headings and text). Everything else is just a feature which you don't need to know to use the basics. As your needs go up, you merely learn the feature you want to use. Most people use only 10-20% of Org's features.

Seriously, M-Ret, TAB and S-TAB are all you need to get going.

I watched the Google Tech Talk on it and was immediately productive. Don't bother with the Org manual until you want to do more.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#304

Post by Spivak »

freeone3000 wrote: post #274
Spivak wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The "big two" have implementations. Definitely not mature but it's getting there.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kdenetwork/krfb/krfb-configur...

You most likely won't see an implementation "for Wayland" because that's like asking for a websocket implementation "for HTTP" the actual compositors that speak Wayland need to implement remote desktop capabilities and then expose an API for managing remote desktop sessions (org.freedesktop.portal.RemoteDesktop) to programs that want to leverage it.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#305

Post by toast0 »

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…

> There's nothing like X forwarding on Windows to my knowledge.

You can run an X server on Windows, there's a bunch to choose from. That lets you run an application on a remote unix system and show it on a Windows system in front of the user. It might be nice to run an application on a remote windows system, but that's always tied to expensive licenses; some of those systems sound like they could be pretty seamless (at least as seamless as remote X), but I don't have experience with them.

Remote X has its problems, but it enables a lot of use cases with a minimum amount of hassle. Connect, run the application, close it when you're done. Other solutions with a remote desktop require starting that session somehow, and either leaving it running or shutting it down somehow. That can be useful if you want a long running session, but is more hassle if you don't.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#306

Post by bjoli »

pmoriarty wrote: post #268
bjoli wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guile Emacs will never happen. Robin's work was amazing, but at it's absolute height guile Emacs was still a slower and buggier version of regular Emacs. I am pretty certain a full guile Emacs would be better than current Emacs (guile is actually a very neat little VM with lots of cool optimisations going on), but that is not where the reality is. As a guiler I want Emacs to be guile-based, but I totally understand t…

Never say never. Guile Emacs was the work of one (very talented) guy. He's moved on to other things, but it's not inconceivable that another Guile fan will pick up the torch some day. If enough Guile/Emacs fans get together this might actually turn in to a viable, maintainable project... this is, after all, how Neovim started. Just some people who were unsatisfied with where Vim itself was going, and teamed up to mak…

With the direction guile has been going in lately, guile is only becoming more attractive.

The problem with integrating it is that you need someone with good knowledge about guile (since the elisp implementation is pretty bad currently) but even more important: someone who know Emacs internals (not many).

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#307

Post by morelisp »

oblio wrote: post #300
morelisp wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not like Emacs doesn't deprecate or change anything. It's not like its feature set froze in the 60s. And it's not like it doesn't document how to turn on CUA bindings, or Windows or OS X-compatible bindings, or have special builds or distributions where these are defaults. If you want C-c, C-x, C-v, you can have it. Today. In many distributions, by default. The keybindings are not the main issue either way in how "usable" a tool like Emacs is. If you think they are, you're missing the entire point of how Emacs is special regarding UIs.

I can throw the bullshit rhetoric right back at you: You think absolutely nothing was better in the 60s? That modern IDEs lost nothing compared to the tools of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago? Why isn't Emacs like Borland? Why isn't Emacs like Visual Studio? Why isn't Emacs like Eclipse? Why isn't it like Mosaic, QuickBasic, Coldfusion? There are reasonable answers to these questions, and they'll tell you also why Emacs isn't like whatever you want to compare it to today.

Maybe Emacs already occupies a local maximum, "a middle ground", taking some of the best compatible ideas from the times it's been alive in. Vi another local maximum. IntelliJ or VSCode, others - but emphasis then on local, and I hope you like retraining.

The problem is not keybindings or what decade its metaphors exist in, it's people see Magit or Org or whatever high-level fully-integrated tool, and want just that. And you don't understand that is an outcome of a path that really does require the whole philosophy to ingest into your workflow. But you don't want to learn the philosophy, you just want to 10x crush git or whatever. No, it won't happen. There's all sorts of dumbass metaphors in in this thread now, but in the end Emacs is garden, not a hammer or a workbench or an oscilloscope or whatever. You get out proportion to what you put in, you work with it not just use it.

Shit's just gonna get faster. You need to find ways to live with it, not copy it. Talk to your fathers-in-law.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#308

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #299
tzs wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#309

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pmoriarty wrote: post #278
sn41 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last year I was 55 and backpacking with my brother (35). I was reading a 1st gen Kindle and having problems without my reading glasses. He kindly pointed out to me that you could change the font size, an idea that absurdly had not occured to me. I still don't know what was more remarkable: that it didn't occur to me, or the way it saved 16 nights of reading for me. It felt a little embarrassing to have to take advantage of this feature initially, but it wasn't hard to embrace and feel deeply grateful for.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#310

Post by paulryanrogers »

mercer wrote: post #258
sn41 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NIH and others have recommendations that may help. I would also suggest seeing a specialist ASAP. A career may last a few decades but your body is for life.
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