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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#321

Post by pmoriarty »

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,…

"The Emacs and Vim ... are outclassed by modern IDE"

Outclassed in what way?

Have you looked at LSP[1] and its support in Emacs[2], for instance?

That's not to mention things like SLIME and paredit for Lispy languages, or the integration of the rest of the Emacs ecosystem in to your development environment, the ability to develop and configure all these development tools in Lisp instead of being forced to switch to some other language, etc.

[1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/

[2] - https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode/

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#322

Post by mcguire »

oblio wrote: post #166
worik wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the original reason to invent X. Literally

And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles... MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.

Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware. The idea of only buying a copy for one machine and running it somewhere else is difficult for that model.

Ubiquitous networking is common in the Unix world, but much less prevalent in the Microsoft and Apple worlds.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#323

Post by mcguire »

sildur wrote: post #129
twic wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wheelchair users are also pretty unusual and we don’t go removing ramps from everywhere. I’m growing pretty tired of the “your use case is unusual, so fuck you” argument.

Supporting "unusual" cases is difficult and takes more effort. In the dog-eat-dog world of commercial development, to win you have to get the majority.

Yes, I had that conversation with a friend.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#324

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> Also I hit Cx-c by mistake thrice a week.

Unbind it. Problem solved. That's what I do with my clumsy fingers.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#325

Post by rpdillon »

saagarjha wrote: post #319
rpdillon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I write Bash in Emacs, and everything else. So for me, no. For a sysadmin, perhaps.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#326

Post by JonathonW »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #148
levosmetalo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, many people use windows and I still miss X forwarding. RDP and VNC are just not a replacement for being able to start 3 different programs on 3 different remote computers, and have them all sitting together on screen next to each other.

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…

You just got me to do a little digging... apparently, as of Windows 10, RemoteApp itself isn't restricted by licensing (at least, any more than Remote Desktop itself is)-- Windows 10 Pro (and Enterprise) can now host RemoteApp applications.

The catch is that the UI to configure RemoteApp isn't present on client versions of Windows. It can be configured manually (by editing the registry then creating RDP files by hand), or there are open source tools that will do the work themselves: https://github.com/kimmknight/remoteapptool

Somewhat outdated Microsoft docs on how to do this by hand: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-security-an...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#327

Post by taeric »

bartread wrote: post #292
taeric wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure I follow. As a power user of computers for years, I would be a liar if I said any of those programs were "quick to get running." Speaking as someone that is getting my kids up and running with computers. Training and tutorial running are the norm and should be. Expecting proficiency in anything with less than a few hours is an exercise in pain.

If you want there to be a new tutorial, I don't know anyone that would be against it. The "game to learn vim" was popular a few times. Same basic idea. I don't know what I would make of it, right off. There are some great typing modes that let you quickly type the current document and score you on speed/accuracy. Moving to other windows is tough in any option. But I could imagine a fun game made to navigate through. (Though, with helm, most navigations are autocompletes nowadays.)

I hate that it feels like a lack of empathy for you. But I really don't see the ecosystem as alien. Any more than I see the python ecosystem as alien, or the java, or javascript, browsers, etc. They are all just a little different. But all have some rough analogs. And all feel like they are just trying to shield users from complicated problems. Many times making things more complicated in the process.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#328

Post by lc9er »

benreesman wrote: post #155

IMHO emacs is kind of a Rorschach test w.r.t. Lisp. Some people really like programming in Lisp, and for them getting emacs to do what they want is fun and rewarding, particularly but not exclusively regarding interface affordances. I personally fall into this category. The fact that it has very similar keybindings to readline/bash (especially important if you spend a lot of time popping on and off servers that don’t…

I'm a (neo)vim user that's been playing around with various Lisps lately. CL and Scheme interaction is worlds ahead in Emacs, but even with evil-mode, I'm having a hard time. There's lots of places where it just stops working, and I have to remember Emacs bindings. Emacs 27 and 28 are more responsive, especially on Windows, but vim actions are near instantaneous.

A cool project I stumbled across is Aniseed[0], which thanks to Neovim's Lua bindings, lets you control neovim with Fennel. I haven't done anything noteworthy yet, but for the first time it actually seems like it would be fun to write my own plugins.

[0] - https://github.com/Olical/aniseed

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#329

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mcguire wrote: post #322
oblio wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the adoption has been huge outside of Unix circles... MacOS doesn't use it, Windows doesn't use it. Even Linux is moving away from it. That's pretty damning for X as a technology during a time when even Windows has started to offer native curl and ssh, just saying.

Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware. The idea of only buying a copy for one machine and running it somewhere else is difficult for that model. Ubiquitous networking is common in the Unix world, but much less prevalent in the Microsoft and Apple worlds.

> Windows and MacOS have been (and are) based on the model of buying a copy of a piece of software for each piece of hardware.

At least anecdotally, I'm not sure I can find a whole lot of supporting evidence for this -- the vast majority of the commercial applications I use on a daily basis let you install them on any compatible system that you own. This isn't just a byproduct of "well, they're not checking"; it's usually explicitly written in the license, it happens with programs that make you enter license codes they validate before running, and notably, it's very explicitly the model of the Mac App Store. Sometimes the license says only one copy of the program can be in use at a time without a site license, but for individual use that's generally fine in practice. (I haven't seen a program that's actually annoying enough to check for running copies of itself on a LAN and shut down if you're violating the license in decades at this point, although I'm sure they're still lurking out there in weird niches. It sounds like something Autodesk software would do.)

Anyway -- maybe running programs remotely using the Xserver model never took off in the Mac world, even after OS X, because there was no prohibition against just installing the software on multiple machines? In practice, it's not something I've missed very often, I admit; while I sometimes like to edit text files remotely, that's not something that feels like it would really be improved by this model over using a local editor that can open files over the network. (Edited to note that I'm not suggesting there aren't still valid use cases for X11's server/client model! They're just not ones that have impacted me; if they did, I'd run XQuartz, which I don't love, but it'd probably get the job done.)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#330

Post by jannes »

dhosek wrote: post #318
linkdd wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 website…

The zoom level can be read by the website and used for fingerprinting, so some browsers see it as a privacy issue to preserve it across visits.

Firefox supports both, but the default is to preserve it, I think.

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