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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#11

Post by agumonkey »

klodolph wrote: post #9
agumonkey wrote: post #3

I'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”

Indeed but the swap is real, I tried vscode (win64) on a 2nd gen i5 and couldn't insert chars in real time. Emacs is not smooth on windows but I couldn't go back to it fast enough.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#12

Post by agumonkey »

BeetleB wrote: post #10
agumonkey wrote: post #3

I'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.

but the market share war is absurd, nothing of quality came out of this

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#13

Post by robocat »

I love this: “Or, as Richard Stallman put it”: ‘It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.’

It is interesting to see a comment that is 100% at odds with the brutal evolution of ideas that occurs in a good ecology of software.

If the same mindset applies to the rest of emacs then they really stand no chance or real progress. (edit: the rest of emacs, and not just key bindings which the RMS quote I have removed from context applies to).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#14

Post by Finnucane »

BeetleB wrote: post #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…

It's an accessibility issue. Low contrast sucks for people with vision issues. dark mode can be kinda sucky too. Not that the default modes of most editors are much better. I'm color blind and have never really found a totally satisfactory scheme.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#17

Post by auganov »

The biggest threat to Emacs is a number of hard to fix performance issues. Like rendering of very long lines. Luckily for Emacs other editors have their own performance issues, but their architectures might make them more fixable.

The other issue is the display model. Rendering using browser technologies enables other editors to do things Emacs just can't.

I'm sure some gimmicks might bring in more users. But implicit in this kind of thinking is that Emacs is perfect as it is and with right marketing it will explode. I sincerely doubt this. The biggest problems are pretty fundamental.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#18

Post by SeanLuke »

Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left.

I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, undo, etc.) are not a fad. They have been the standard in everything except for Emacs for over THIRTY FIVE YEARS. They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.

Pop-up menus on right-button-click have been standard for almost as long, dating to X11 and NeXTSTEP (which is where OS X got them).

And the most awful trend is in preventing clear improvements in modes and functionality from coming to the forefront simply because geezers are not used to them. The argument seems to be that making all these kinds of things standard would be hard on the geezers. This is nonsense. Unlike the newbies, the geezers know how to turn this stuff off.

The geezers prevent this because Emacs is their ecosystem. But for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly incompatible and archaic. This is myopia pure and simple.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#19

Post by Finnucane »

robocat wrote: post #13

I love this: “Or, as Richard Stallman put it”: ‘It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.’ It is interesting to see a comment that is 100% at odds with the brutal evolution of ideas that occurs in a good ecology of software. If the same mindset applies to the rest of emacs then they really stand no chance or real progress. (edit: the rest of emacs, and not j…

I suppose rms can't understand why anybody would think anything could be better than what he chose to do 40-something years ago.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#20

Post by vinceguidry »

SeanLuke wrote: post #18

Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left. I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, un…

Emacs has been at that stage for well over a decade, arguably two. What we're seeing now is the slow process of finally muddling their way out.
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