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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#311

Post by MarcScott »

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,…

I'm not a C/C++ developer, but I spend most of my time in Emacs. Most of my development time is spent in Python, and Emacs serves as an excellent IDE for the language.

However, that in itself is not my reason for preferring Emacs. It's also my markdown editor, often my file manager, my PDF viewer, my image viewer, my git interface, IRC client, email client... I could go on, but I'll stop there.

Emacs is not and has never been an IDE, it's a highly versatile and extensible text-editor. You can't compare apples and oranges.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#312

Post by MarcScott »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #131
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…

As a long time emacs user, I can confirm that emacs is terrible... and everything else out there is deficient. I can write custom code (ew, elisp) to determine how to switch between buffers (test buffer and code under test) and I can run my tests and find operations and the like in a first class buffer and a dozen things like that which are just incredibly painful in other editors. Also I hit Cx-c by mistake thrice a…

Run Emacs as a server. You can kill the client accidentally, then just load another client instantly and carry on from where you left off.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#313

Post by dang »

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…

Coincidentally, there is a current thread about blind mathematicians:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429493

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#314

Post by [deleted] »

Spivak wrote: post #304
freeone3000 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

[deleted]

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#315

Post by linkdd »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #309
pmoriarty wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 advant…

Thanks to Chrome which saves the zoom settings per domain, I have "configured" every site I read to be at the same size (125% for most of them, 110% for some, 200% for monsters who put a very small font).

I do this mainly because switching from font size to font size actually tires my eyes (they always need to refocus) on the long term.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#316

Post by spear »

Spivak wrote: post #304
freeone3000 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I haven't tried it, but there's also this one for wlroots-based compositors (eg. sway): https://github.com/any1/wayvnc

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#317

Post by JonathonW »

MereInterest wrote: post #157
vladvasiliu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, RDP allows you to only launch one application as opposed to a whole desktop. They call that RemoteApp. That you can't just launch that on every machine you want (in particular non server installs) is more a limitation of Microsoft's licensing model than of the protocol itself. For me, from a usability point of view, RDP runs circles around the other solutions. I've used this fairly often during the lockd…

RDP works well if you want to connect to a remote machine, then work only on that machine for a significant amount of time. For me, I need to switch in and out of several different RDP sessions, which is a nightmare. Alt tab works either within a session if full screened, or within the local computer if not full screened. That means I need to also periodically use ctrl alt break to switch between full screen and wind…

> In windowed mode, I can either have scrollbars to view a subsection, or I can scale the window. Doing the right thing, changing the size of the remote desktop when the local window is resized, isn't an option because that is set at connection time.

Side note: if the server is running Windows 8.1 or later (or the equivalent server versions, Server 2012 R2 or later), this isn't the case any more-- RDP sessions can be resized freely at any time.

Naturally, the built-in RDP client that comes with Windows doesn't support this (because, of course, why would it?), but the UWP Remote Desktop app in the Windows Store does (as does the current Mac client).

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#318

Post by dhosek »

linkdd wrote: post #315
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advant…

Thanks to Chrome which saves the zoom settings per domain, I have "configured" every site I read to be at the same size (125% for most of them, 110% for some, 200% for monsters who put a very small font). I do this mainly because switching from font size to font size actually tires my eyes (they always need to refocus) on the long term.

This change seems to have made its way upstream into Webkit (or perhaps went downstream to Chrome? Who knows, probably the former though). It's really nice to have the zoom setting preserved on visits rather than on tabs. I'm also fond of the two finger double tap on the trackpad to zoom into a narrow column of text on a website (I assume Chrome also supports this) which is my primary mode of reading a lot of websites.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#319

Post by saagarjha »

rpdillon wrote: post #229
roydivision wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think my Emacs knowledge has paid off ten times more than any particular language I've picked up. It's my generic tooling platform I bring to every job, regardless of platform or tech stack.

Bash?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#320

Post by spear »

twic wrote: post #95
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

For terminal server use cases, there are things like VNC, SPICE, NX, etc. The X11/ssh thing is for when you want to run a mix of local and remote applications on a single desktop, which i think is pretty unusual these days.

My remaining use case for X11 remote display doesn't quite fit in the VNC/etc. remote display paradigm. At work, I submit a job to queuing software that picks a server (based on load and resource requirements) from a pool on the internal network. The GUI for that job then pops up on my X11 display. I don't really care which server is running the job, and the job is just using $DISPLAY -- we don't even forward over ssh.
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