Toward a “modern” Emacs
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Toward a “modern” Emacs
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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#2Yeah definitely ignore all the seasonal requests for the latest fads, and just focus on the last paragraph. I think the post author agrees, hence the sarcastic tone.
The fact is Emacs does many neat things but is also a giant steaming pile of sh-- tech debt. I'm sure VSCode will get there too as time passes, but older editors simply have a head start in this regard.
Emacs needs it's Neovim (which also contributes back to Vim) moment. My old favorite would be returning to https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs and finishing that off. No reason Emacs needs to also maintain it's own Lisp engine, and I'm sure lexical scope would help reign in tech debt too.
Oh, and make emacsclient to a eamcsserver on another machine work, please! That would be such a killer app.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#3I'm surprised by this .. emacs have seen so much activity on so many layers. From cute transient overlays, lsp, deeply critical modes (magit), and even deep level work. The community is sharing a lot of extensions of all kinds through melpa and similar. I don't think emacs have been as 'popular' as now since long ago.
Also one consideration, emacs is still lean, all those others editors are html/js based and hyper heavy.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#4The Emacs community should start by perfecting lsp-mode so that it can compete with VS Code in terms of functionality. That will simultaneously keep power users from switching AND bring in people from other "easy to use" editors that lack such functionality.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#5I think if you could easily install and use emacs to edit a text file with no knowledge it's userbase would grow exponentially overnight.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#6Yeah definitely ignore all the seasonal requests for the latest fads, and just focus on the last paragraph. I think the post author agrees, hence the sarcastic tone. The fact is Emacs does many neat things but is also a giant steaming pile of sh-- tech debt. I'm sure VSCode will get there too as time passes, but older editors simply have a head start in this regard. Emacs needs it's Neovim (which also contributes bac…
emacsclient to an emacsserver on another machine works fine. You'll want to tunnel it over ssh.
If the machines don't have a shared filesystem namespace, I suggest writing a small wrapper that translates the file's pathname to what the server needs (whether that's a mounted network filesystem or a tramp string or whatever).
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#7> There was some discussion of adopting the Solarized color palette in particular. As Dmitry Gutov pointed out, though, Solarized makes for a rather low-contrast experience
This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark.
For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good. When I introduced it to a coworker, he didn't want to switch to it because of the low contrast. After a week of using it, he can't imagine going back to high contrast.
As for the rest, while I do agree with some points, I will say: If you make Emacs more like VS Code, then people will have even fewer reasons to use Emacs.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#8The Emacs community should start by perfecting lsp-mode so that it can compete with VS Code in terms of functionality. That will simultaneously keep power users from switching AND bring in people from other "easy to use" editors that lack such functionality.
Emacs needs this so bad but I really believe it could never attract enough people to develop and maintain it without sane defaults.
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#9I'm surprised by this .. emacs have seen so much activity on so many layers. From cute transient overlays, lsp, deeply critical modes (magit), and even deep level work. The community is sharing a lot of extensions of all kinds through melpa and similar. I don't think emacs have been as 'popular' as now since long ago. Also one consideration, emacs is still lean, all those others editors are html/js based and hyper he…
Funny that Emacs is considered “lean” today. It was definitely consider one of the heaviest, most bloated editors out there in the past. “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping”
Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs
#10I'm surprised by this .. emacs have seen so much activity on so many layers. From cute transient overlays, lsp, deeply critical modes (magit), and even deep level work. The community is sharing a lot of extensions of all kinds through melpa and similar. I don't think emacs have been as 'popular' as now since long ago. Also one consideration, emacs is still lean, all those others editors are html/js based and hyper he…
The article did point it out. It likely has more users than it ever has - just that the growth is slow, and it has dropped in terms of percentage use.