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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#21

Post by SippinLean »

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…

The point isn't to reduce the contrast, it's to use contrast based on hue and less on value.

Accessibility is the real concern. Solarized fails many of the checks for accessible text under standards such as WCAG 2.0.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#22

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#23

Post by liability »

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…

As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was.

As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that ship with Emacs by default (evil already does.)

(I chose evil, because I came from vim. Maybe this is why Emacs was so easy for me to pick up. But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane. Rather, I think it has a marketting ''problem'' relative to Vim.)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#25

Post by BeetleB »

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 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

It doesn't look like your an Emacs user. As another commenter pointed out (as did the article indirectly), Emacs has more users than ever. It's definitely growing - not dwindling. As an Emacs user, the last decade has shown an immense growth in capabilities via MELPA packages. The number of sites with tips on improving Emacs flows has also gone up exponentially.

Not only is it not dying, it's thriving.

> They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.

For a whole other definition of standard. A lot of the popular DOS applications from Reagan/Bush's time did not use these keybindings. Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins were the norm. Ctrl-C for quitting was the norm.

(I'm not against CUA bindings by default - merely pointing out a misconception you have).

> 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.

Actually, Emacs is pretty good at interacting with the wider ecosystems. It can communicate and interact with other processes, etc. I can, for example, link to a message in MS Outlook and have it open up in my TODO list in Emacs.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#26

Post by beagle3 »

Finnucane wrote: post #19
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.

A lot of things are different without being better.

Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early Windows editors - which makes a lot more mnemonic sense.

It’s better to standardize on something, but that something isn’t necessarily better and is often worse.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#27

Post by smabie »

math0ne wrote: post #8
JacksonGariety wrote: post #4

The 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.

I find that lsp-mode works pretty well most of the time. If you look at the commit history, the project is very active. It's also pretty easy to set up.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#28

Post by mapgrep »

I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.”

Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.

It is over 40 years old.

When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my first instinct isn’t to ask what the people behind it can learn from me but what I can learn from them.

I’m not saying the editor can not be improved. But I think the bar is much higher than this. It’s not an insult to say something like emacs is not “modern.” Of course it’s not. And changing the colors? The shortcuts that have worked for decades? Please.

If someone thinks emacs will be more successful with these cosmetic changes they are welcome to fork it since this is one of the earliest open source programs. Code talks, a bunch of people opining on a mailing list is pretty worthless in comparison.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#29

Post by da39a3ee »

This really doesn't seem that complicated.

(1) Either we aim to make Emacs popular or we don't.

Personally, I don't think we should bother: I suggest we make it a razor-sharp tool for people prepared to learn some lisp. I also suggest we open up the development experience to allow contributions and code review via PRs.

But lots of people want to make it popular. So fine, we do that. Then there's no argument at all for keeping the defaults like a bunch of male lisp programmers over the age of 50 want. Because every single one of them has an emacs init file they've been tending to for decades and they know how to make the relevant changes to override the defaults.

So if we are making it popular there should be no time whatsoever given to RMS saying that some keybinding from the early 80s is objectively better.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#30

Post by flowerlad »

I have been an Emacs user for 20+ years, and I don't use editors that can't be configured to use Emacs key bindings. Luckily IDEs like Visual Studio can be configured to mimic Emacs.

To me the issues that make Emacs not modern are: (1) Slow startup. (2) Buggy language modes. (The ones that come with it are good, but third party ones such as web-mode are buggy.) and (3) No intellisense out of the box.

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