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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#41

Post by mi_lk »

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…

> Emacs has more users than ever. It's definitely growing - not dwindling.

Growing in terms of the number of users, dwindling in terms of the share among editors

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#42

Post by ssivark »

xrd wrote: post #39

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…

Have you tried the “straight” package manager? Quite nifty.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#43

Post by FandangoRanger »

im3w1l wrote: post #24

Emacs' very-hard-to-fix issue is that it's based on a grid of characters. This means it will never be able to do many nice IDE things.

Emacs will never be a GUI-only editor, it was designed for a terminal and that is still a use case that many people take advantage of.

Don't worry though - if you don't like Emacs you can use any of a number of other editors.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#44

Post by klodolph »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #2

Yeah 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…

I would love something like “Emacs’s Neovim”. Guile should be enough. Keep packages out of the global namespace. Get rid of Elisp and all its differences. Let me use C-Z/X/C/V for undo/cut/copy/paste (or maybe C-Shift-C is fine?)

Keep org-mode, web-mode, etc :-)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#45

Post by wtetzner »

mapgrep wrote: post #28

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…

You don’t even need to fork it. Just have write a .emacs file that new users can copy to their home directory that sets all of that stuff up.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#46

Post by twoodfin »

beagle3 wrote: post #26
Finnucane wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those might make more sense, but even if my MacBook had Insert & Del keys, I doubt I could Ctrl- them with one hand.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#47

Post by wtetzner »

xrd wrote: post #39

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…

use-package has basically solved the package management problem for me in Emacs.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#48

Post by _ph_ »

auganov wrote: post #17

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 implici…

Just today I edited a file which basically consisted out of a line with almost 2 million characters, my emacs was basically unresponsive for a longer time. This amount of data shouldn't slow down a modern machine that badly.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#49

Post by FandangoRanger »

SeanLuke wrote: post #34
FandangoRanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't pass the switch test.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#50

Post by sebow »

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…

I'm not even a "geezer" of which you speak for but the fact that emacs does not have the standard copy-paste, cut, save, etc key-bindings by default is what makes it so powerful. The reason the community is the way it is is presumably because the learning curve makes the people who give up easily left out. The only fact I personally "hate" emacs is only that i don't have the time to learn lisp & customize the editor to the full extent myself, but that's not really a strong argument against emacs.(As resources about customizing emacs are not that hard to find, and the lisp/emacs-lisp community is not 'harsh')

Just because everyone has some "standard"-deemed features does not mean emacs should have it aswell.Are you complaining about these things with vim aswell? A lot of people use emacs because of performance reasons, customization opportunities and more or less because emacs is de facto almost an operating system.

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