Emacs is special regarding UIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#371

Post by nikki93 » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 3:59 AM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #350

iterativ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 VS…

Once you try to run VSCode on a Chromebook, you realize how 'good' it is. :)

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#372

Post by srtjstjsj » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #363

rbanffy wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, in typography, a point is 1/72th of an inch. I don't think desktop computers, with the possible exception of the NeXT, ever respected that.

It's not possible to respect it, really. Put a nominally 12pt font on your screen. Now plugin a monitor with 2x the resolution. Now plugin in a projector with 4x the surface area, but the same resolution. Drag the window around. What happens? Yes, in highly defined scenarios, where you know for certain the number of pixels per inch and you know it doesn't change, you can generate as 12pt font that is actually 1/6th o…

Projectors don't even have surface area! There's no fixed projection distance.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#373

Post by kalleboo » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

andreareina wrote: post #87

dmortin wrote: post #46

Emacs is not a text editor, it's a platform independent VM which can run your scripts with a text UI. E.g. do you want keep an eye on some information which can be fetched from the net? You just write a script which regularly fetches the info and puts it into a buffer, so you can take a look at it anytime, and then regardless of platform you have that info readily available just by installing your own emacs config fi…

We've been joking about emacs being an OS for a long time. And it even reads email (still haven't set that up actually...)

Emacs is a great OS, just lacking a decent text editor

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#374

Post by kazinator » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #350

iterativ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 VS…

Can you share a screenshot/paste of your process listing with VSCode running, showing virtual memory sizes?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#375

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

srtjstjsj wrote: post #372

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible to respect it, really. Put a nominally 12pt font on your screen. Now plugin a monitor with 2x the resolution. Now plugin in a projector with 4x the surface area, but the same resolution. Drag the window around. What happens? Yes, in highly defined scenarios, where you know for certain the number of pixels per inch and you know it doesn't change, you can generate as 12pt font that is actually 1/6th o…

Projectors don't even have surface area! There's no fixed projection distance.

Projectors are supposed to allow you to disrespect that. You don't use a projector the same way you use a tablet or a desktop monitor.

Monitors are not. They have fixed surface area and it's entirely possible to respect that, since modern monitors identify themselves to the OS, so it's relatively trivial to calculate pixel density.

This sizing system was designed to be used with paper and PostScript printers respect it (or it'd be impractical to drive printers with different pixel densities).

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#376

Post by OrderlyTiamat » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 6:24 AM UTC

RMPR wrote: post #161

dmortin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant the case when you have to use an other machine and naturally emacs users want to use emacs even there, so that's given. But on Windows, for example, python may not be installed, so that's an extra install, while if you have your usual scripts in emacs then it's just a matter of installing one's emacs config which one does anyway. I use python too when it's the less hassle. E.g. when parsing a page with Beatif…

> But on Windows, for example, python may not be installed Actually Python is not a very good example since Windows now includes python and python3 commands by default[0] 0: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-in-the-windows-...

Actually it's a great example, because regardless of what microsoft says, it doesn't actually include python, just an empty executable that exits and tells you to download python from the windows store. You have to manually fix you path to get that folder out if you want to download it through some other way, too.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#377

Post by kergonath » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 6:26 AM UTC

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.

Because anything that does not exist on Windows is useless, of course...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#378

Post by jlarocco » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 6:26 AM UTC

hpfr wrote: post #62

jwr wrote: post #11

One begins to understand the advantages of this approach after 10-15 years or so. I feel that I am constantly being forced into new "UI paradigms", and it isn't always a change for the better. I started with DOS (Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool), then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (which was mostly garbage and I did not enjoy the UI at all). I then started using Linux and discovered Emacs. Whe…

The shift away from X11 means no more forwarding X11 applications over ssh, which is slow at best and buggy and insecure at worst. A small price to pay for eliminating tearing and actually-secure screen locking. There are valid criticisms of the move to Wayland but I don’t really think this is one of them; if you really need remote access to graphical applications you almost certainly should not be using X forwarding…

Speak for yourself. I use X11 forwarding a few times a week, and it works fine for the things I need it for.

"It doesn't work for me, therefore nobody needs it," isn't a valid argument.

And thinking about it a bit, it wouldn't have made any sense to keep the feature around for so long if it weren't useful.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#379

Post by toyg » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 6:48 AM UTC

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.

I believe this has been in Firefox since forever...

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#380

Post by toyg » Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 6:49 AM UTC

jannes wrote: post #330

dhosek wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m pretty sure the default in FF is to preserve zoom level per-domain across sessions.