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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#341

Post by nikki93 »

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,…

For some people, using a computer is meant to be a pleasurable experience, and Vim / Emacs might let them build this up in ways that personally align with their tastes. I've spent years in Visual Studio (not Code -- the older one, but also a year or so in Code), and IntelliJ, and Vim, and Emacs with Spacemacs. They all felt good for when I used them. Like which genre of music I happen to be into at the time.

At the end of the day, it's kind of just shifting around based on what feels good. It feels similar to sitting in a cafe for a bit, but some times working from home, and some times in the mountains.

But there's no need to put people down by saying stuff like "poor man's" IMO. And if you're restricted to what makes C# and Java tolerable, that's a small space. There's a lot more stuff out there.

And programming is not as simple as "make decisions that optimize your engineering throughput" IMO. Otherwise gardening would be agriculture, right? Both are important in their own ways.

In any case Vim's terminal emulation and asyncness these days along with coc.nvim brings it back on track IMO. There was a period where it was behind.

I do think it depends a ton on language. The best experience in Vim is editing Go, I think. And then TS and C++ have been a close second. Lisps are not great, Emacs tends to better. For Java and C# it's definitely IDEs. VSCode is also fine for a lot of langs, in a more out of the box way. Cursive is also good I hear for Clojures. If you need to move between a lot of langs, the only IDEs that pan out are IntelliJ mostly, unless you count Code as one. But Vim and Emacs have the best multiwindow and multi buffer management. And the best git integration for patch by patch staging, for sure.

And ofc for ObjC and Swift it tends to be Xcode. If you're really into Freepascal then Lazarus etc. Smalltalks are their own thing ... it keeps going on.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#342

Post by iterativ »

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,…

Well, let's see what software engineers use Emacs.

Donald Knuth. Author of "the art of computer programming" and many contributions in computer science.

Linus Torvalds. Original author of Linux (the most widely used kernel) & git (most widely distributed version control). In fact, he wrote his own version of emacs. He doesn't do much, if at all, coding now.

Joe Armstrong. Author of Erlang.

Guido van Rossum. Author of Python.

Yukihiro Matsumoto. Author of Ruby.

Rich Hickey. Author of Clojure.

Andrei Alexandrescu. Author of D.

Xavier Leroy. Author of OCaml.

Michael Widenius. Author of MySQL & MariaDB.

Guy Steele. Co-author of Scheme.

Stephen Wolfram. Physicist, computer scientist & author of Mathematica.

Peter Norvig. Research director at Google & well known Lisper.

RMS. Well, original author of GCC, Emacs & the GNU system.

All of them, apparently, don't require one of those "powerful" IDEs.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#343

Post by tiborsaas »

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…

At what project size did you notice performance issues? I use VSCode as my daily workhorse and I can believe without a doubt that it can get into trouble if I forget to gitignore node_modules :) But putting ST on the same page got me curious.

I'm on the other end of the spectrum, I'm betting that computers will become fast enough with time to run these bloated editors that were designed to be usable.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#344

Post by voldacar »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #338
pmoriarty wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Is that extra latency an inherent limitation of how Wayland is designed No, most Wayland compositors can already skip composition and pass the window contents directly to the screen in case of displaying just a single fullscreen window. There is also work ongoing on utilizing hardware planes when possible, to skip composition and improve performance in other cases as well - going beyond what was ever possible on X.…

Sorry but I have tried wayland multiple times (most recent ~12mo ago) and this has never been true in my experience. At least on my nvidia card. And the wayland people have been saying stuff like "oh we know better performance is possible, we just need to implement x, y, and z" for many years.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#345

Post by pmontra »

lallysingh wrote: post #217
brnt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're excluding pretty much every laptop there.

Thinkpads group their function keys. Who outside apple doesn't?

My HP laptops don't. It's been ages since I used a non laptop keyboard and I forgot about grouping. It's a useful UX though.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#346

Post by Bnshsysjab »

spear wrote: post #320
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.

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 ss…

I’m not an X hater but just know you’ve given that server access to your display socket which is effectively remote command execution.

In most cases this could be solved with a good web user interface, but you can rest assured X won’t be dead in the next 5-15 years, and you can use an intermediary box w/VNC if security is that much of a concern.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#347

Post by pmontra »

jerf wrote: post #193
jonfw wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I... uh... am almost in some sense ashamed to admit this, but I've been using emacs for about 23 years now, and I still don't program elisp. I can just about diagnose errors in my not-very-complicated .emacs with a bit of googling, and that's about it. I've read about it, and I understand the basics, but I know nothing about the APIs and have no experience in it past one-liners. It probably is a good idea to learn it…

I got good at elisp in my first years of emacs 30 years ago. Tons of customizations. Then I let it go. I remember the basics but I never write any serious script. No need for that. There are so many packages ready to be installed and Stackoverflow. The solutions are already there so I can concentrate on my job.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#348

Post by louai »

billfruit wrote: post #262
GuB-42 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, we do X11 forwarding all the times. We have a wide variety of UNIX machines and we often need to run several graphical applications from different machines (not a remote desktop). X11 forwarding works with the latest Linux distros as well a 20+ year old systems running motif apps. Note: the old systems are now virtualized but we still need them, I work in the aeronautic industry and these are the time scales…

Not just Electron, even QT as well performs horrible over X11 forwarding in recent versions... Things seems to be going backwards in this area..

When I was at Qt I spent a decent amount of time porting the native rendering engine from Qt4 to Qt5. It should be available and work relatively well. I have retired from the Qt project, but it looks like the code is still there in the repo. [1] You might need to tell the configure script to build it. To use it, set the QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING environment variable.

[1] https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/src/plugins/platf...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#349

Post by jrockway »

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.

Chrome has a "minimum font size" setting that overrides websites that use small fonts. I set my minimum high (16 normal, 14 minimum) and haven't run into any breakage.

(I am not sure if the point sizes of fonts have any meaning. I like my text a certain size and it's a different number in Chrome, Powershell, and Putty, which is weird to me...)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#350

Post by TAForObvReasons »

iterativ wrote: post #342
oblio wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Well, let's see what software engineers use Emacs. Donald Knuth. Author of "the art of computer programming" and many contributions in computer science. Linus Torvalds. Original author of Linux (the most widely used kernel) & git (most widely distributed version control). In fact, he wrote his own version of emacs. He doesn't do much, if at all, coding now. Joe Armstrong. Author of Erlang. Guido van Rossum. Author of…

Those developers by and large were active in software development before the creation of VSCode or IntelliJ. If you've already invested time and energy to learning the ins and outs of one tool, the hurdle to switch is large.

VSCode would need to be 10x better for the seasoned veterans to justify switching. If it were only 2x better, arguably the investment would not be worth it, but it doesn't change the fact that VSCode would be 2x better than emacs.

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