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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#31

Post by FandangoRanger »

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…

Is it really necessary to ascribe some negative quality of ageism to people who created and use software and then castigate them for it? Do you work for PeopleSoft? Makes your argument seem weak and flimsy, in fact arguments like yours can be dismissed out of hand.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#32

Post by da39a3ee »

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…

> For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good.

I stare at a computer all day and I hate low contrast themes, including solarized.

I am not claiming my view applies to everyone, so please, could you stop doing that. It is subjective: there is nothing inherently superior about solarized, even for people who stare at screens all day.

And it is not just an accessibility issue. It is a subjectivity issue.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#33

Post by [deleted] »

liability wrote: post #23
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…

[deleted]

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#34

Post by SeanLuke »

FandangoRanger wrote: post #31
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…

Is it really necessary to ascribe some negative quality of ageism to people who created and use software and then castigate them for it? Do you work for PeopleSoft? Makes your argument seem weak and flimsy, in fact arguments like yours can be dismissed out of hand.

I am one of those geezers.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#35

Post by BeetleB »

SippinLean wrote: post #21
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.

> The point isn't to reduce the contrast, it's to use contrast based on hue instead of value.

It's not one or the other. It's both:

> Solarized reduces brightness contrast but, unlike many low contrast colorschemes, retains contrasting hues

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#36

Post by SeanLuke »

BeetleB wrote: post #25
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 pack…

> It doesn't look like your an Emacs user.

I have been an avid Emacs user since, I think, 1988.

> A lot of the popular DOS applications

Bzzt. 35 years ago the standard was Windows and MacOS. Soon thereafter NeXTSTEP and nearly all X11 apps adapted the same.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#37

Post by da39a3ee »

smabie wrote: post #27
math0ne wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I found that it didn't work out of the box for me (Rust and Python) but that eglot did work out of the box.

Eglot, not lsp-mode, will be the LSP implementation that makes it into the GNU Emacs distribution (because it is being developed with FSF assignments, and because the maintainer is active in the GNU Emacs development community, maintaining eldoc and flymake, and maybe others).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#38

Post by the-smug-one »

How about instead the Emacs website and splash screen recommends different `flavours' of Emacs instead? Such as Doom and Prelude for example. No reason to change vanilla Emacs.

Stop having Emacs be the recommended way to install and use Emacs.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#39

Post by xrd »

I've been an emacs user for more than 20 years.

Is it just me, or is this article completely missing the point?

I've switched to VS Code because I can install extensions so easily. Getting a theme installed is not my concern at all.

With emacs, I'm still never sure how to get elpa (or why not melpa) to work correctly. And, modern packages for react never seem to be available there anyway.

I'm still astounded package management is so bad on emacs.

For the record, emacs and tmux are still the first thing I install on any new server. I still use emacs on a daily basis. But, not on my desktop Linux machine anymore.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#40

Post by donio »

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 blissful state where it's resisting sacrificing its core user base by trying to cater to people who are not going to use it anyway.

As a long term user I am very happy with the direction of Emacs development over the past few years. Emacs is pretty much the only piece of modern software where I don't have worry about losing functionality when I upgrade to a new version. Each new version is better than the old one.

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