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Emacs is special regarding UIs

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Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#381

Post by michaelmrose »

ziml77 wrote: post #176
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts her…

Personal 4th reason: My mind keeps going back to this when I think I want to try Emacs again > [Every dynamic module] should also export a symbol named plugin_is_GPL_compatible to indicate that its code is released under the GPL or compatible license; Emacs will signal an error if your program tries to load modules that don't export such a symbol. The viral nature of the GPL already bothers me. Emacs trying to enforc…

As a user why would the lack of proprietary loadable modules for Emacs possibly bother you?

There is an extremely active addon ecosystem as it stands.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#382

Post by michaelmrose »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #58
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Emacs and org-mode is frequently mentioned on HN as being awesome, but I don't feel like I could ever switch; I've got enough issues with vim already. For one, all the keyboard shortcuts and commands that you have to learn; I don't know if I have the capacity to learn all that anymore, not without deliberate practice, while in modern editors you can get by with keyboard + mouse and slowly learn some new shortcuts her…

They appeal to two different kinds of people. The first set (you and I) value the convenience of a job completed with a highly tuned and tested tool developed by word leaders in programming technology (Jetbrains). The other set of people wish to be able to tune things exactly as they wish, and focus on hyperoptimization of a set of known tasks that they become expert in. Neither is wrong, but I do believe that when s…

I think your comment is insightful there is a human inclination to simplify multidimensional situations into a single spectrum wherein we inevitably solidify our own preferences as the preferred end of the spectrum. Smart capable people like ME do foo whereas less clever people do bar.

I think you have properly pegged the determinant as desire for customization.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#383

Post by forgotmypw17 »

jwr wrote: post #202
boogies wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Norton Commander, anyone? to this day there is no comparable tool What’s the problem with Midnight Commander and/or the 23 other programs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander#Norton_Comman... ?

Midnight Commander is nowhere near where Norton Commander was in terms of usability. Some of that is because of platform restrictions (terminal and keyboard access limitations) and some because of a difference in philosophy. Norton Commander was simple, but it got the simple things right.

When I still used Windows as my primary desktop, I found Total Commander to be very usable.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#384

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

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.

What? Can the browser not just… not tell the website?

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#385

Post by slightwinder »

shawnz wrote: post #249
slightwinder wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could construct the same kinds of problematic UIs in Emacs too... If you do it on purpose, then maybe, but not to the degree of what webstack offers. People already have a hard time to handle org-mode-hierachies and folding... > The Web is also designed around a linear flow of text. No, that went out the door when CSS was added. Now it's designed around random positioning of little boxes. Some boxes contain lin…

Sure it does. First of all, you can lay text anywhere you want in a buffer, thus letting you create whatever little boxes you want. Plus, it has support for images and even arbitrary GTK widgets in that buffer too. Remember before CSS, people just did the same thing anyway with tables. CSS only made easier what people were already doing. I am sure the same would happen to Emacs if it ever became a widely used piece o…

> Sure it does. First of all, you can lay text anywhere you want in a buffer,

Does the emacs-api directly support this or is it just some hacked up solution everyone must do on their own? Of course can you emulate boxes and any kind of layout-sytem, but whether it's a general supported solution or just some ugly hack that has no backing in the general culture of a software, makes a significant difference. It's the difference between 99% of all encountered content is problematic for accesability or just 1%.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#386

Post by gitrog »

pmoriarty wrote: post #227
jerf wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using Emacs without knowing eLisp is like owning a race car but always driving it in first gear.

I would say it's more like driving a race car but - provided you use one of the many configurations or frameworks ala Spacemacs/Doom out there - having the gears automated by the car's system.

An experienced racer would be much better off with driving in manual, but for a beginner or someone never expecting to push the car to its limits the automated gears are plenty good enough.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#387

Post by hdjdbtbgwjsn »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #329
mcguire wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Per seat licences are very standard. Interesting you've never encountered it when e.g. an MS Office 365 subscription is for so many devices (seats).

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#389

Post by blauditore »

sreevisakh wrote: post #181
blauditore wrote: post #142

Slightly off-topic, but people here seem to like that stuff: The author has a personal website[0], which is a gem from the "old internet" - a wild mix of technical stuff, pet cat pictures, and some personal history. [0]: https://delysid.org

Very interesting! Made me curious about how a blind person codes (accessibility technology). Aside from that, I am also curious as to why you characterize the website as from the 'old internet'. It looks like a modern minimalist static site to me. Not what I would expect from a 90s site. What do you consider as the distinguishing features of old internet vs the modern version?

Well, my classification of it as 'old internet' is of course subjective. To me it feels like many newer websites appear more clinical, in both, positive and negative ways. I think it's way less common now to mix personal stuff like pet photos with more professional topics like coding. Poeple who post both usually do this on different platforms (social networks vs. personal blog).

From a technical point of view, the website makes heavier use of tooling that nowadays are used less, because there are alternaltives. One example are actual hyperlinks and different pages, whereas today there's some trend towards keeping more content on a single page and use buttons to navigate it.

Re: Emacs is special regarding UIs

#390

Post by badsectoracula »

pmoriarty wrote: post #302
voldacar wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, it is an inherent limitation of Wayland because Wayland assumes a compositor and compositors run asynchronously to the applications that produce graphics (it could be possible to run them synchronously but then a single application could freeze the entire desktop - and even when it worked, you'd force all applications to sync with each other), meaning that what the compositor composes is based on the last complete frame it got (and while the compositor is composing its composition the application might as well be waiting, virtual thumbs twirling, with a new frame ready).

In comparison X11 doesn't assume a compositor - it can support composition, but doesn't require it. If there isn't a compositor, applications draw directly to the framebuffer and content appears as long as it is sent to the GPU (you may even send stuff faster than the monitor can keep up with - this is how you get tearing for example).

You can work around Wayland's limitation the same way you can work around it in Windows: get a monitor with faster refresh rates. As usual, better hardware is what fills the holes created by shoddy software (i got an expensive 165Hz monitor expecting to have a never-seen-before butter smooth experience on Windows - in reality what i got was more or less the experience i had back when i could disable the compositor in Windows 7).

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