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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#61

Post by evolve2k »

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…

As I see it the older emacs users see many of their decisions as right because they made them. What I’m sensing is a total lack of basic design thinking. A “neoEmacs” could achieve this, get clear who the new target audience is and based around this what a neoEmacs clear project goals would be (something like “position an emacs to be the editor of choice for people born after the year 2000”) [or whatever] and then with a new persona start to unpack critical design considerations and priorities a project plan from there.

For emacs to survive/thrive it will need to go through a process of transformation. Even from these conversations I can see right now that can’t happen with the current core emacs project. I neoEmacs would be a great way forward.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#63

Post by FandangoRanger »

efficax wrote: post #51
FandangoRanger wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What can you not do with a grid of characters exactly?

I think we're seeing a culture clash between people who come from a computing background where the terminal was either not used at all, or was a second class citizen, and people who come from a background where a terminal is the main way to interact with the system and the GUI is relegated to mostly showing terminals and doing the GUI-oriented tasks that can't be easily accomplished in the terminal, like pixel-image editing and drawing.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#64

Post by Miraste »

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…

> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.

Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online.

Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but has stayed close to that number for years.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#65

Post by mixmastamyk »

SeanLuke wrote: post #36
BeetleB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While Windows technically existed in '85, no one statistically was using it yet. Other's copied the CUA interface into the late 80s however.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#66

Post by Jtsummers »

mi_lk wrote: post #41
BeetleB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Market share shouldn't matter.

The numbers that do matter: Are the number of contributors increasing, decreasing, or stable? Are the number of users increasing, decreasing, or stable? Is the rate of increase (if increasing) for either of these itself increasing, decreasing, or stable?

As long as contributors and users are both increasing, you're probably ok. As long as the rates of increase are at least stable, you're ok.

It's not like this is a life or death struggle, emacs will probably outlive us all.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#67

Post by wrycoder »

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…

The Prelude package uses dark mode to give Emacs a modern look. And adds line numbers for the same reason - LOL.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#68

Post by Jtsummers »

Miraste wrote: post #64
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…

> It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks. Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I've never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online. Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but…

org-mode and magit seem to bring in a lot of emacs users, even if they're only using one of those two things. If I stopped using emacs for code tomorrow, I'd still use org-mode and magit and still encourage others to do so as well, even if I also pushed a different editor or IDE for writing code.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#69

Post by kzemek »

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…

> 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

vim might be arcane compared to Notepad, but I've been successfully using vim as an editor of choice in ssh pretty much throughout the whole uni without knowing more than :w and :q (at which point it basically was a notepad). I was ever completely lost in Emacs though, with its nested C-x, M-x seemingly without rhyme or reason. I wouldn't "outright" reject that hypothesis without more scrutiny.

Anecdotally, I've been an Emacs (Spacemacs) user for a few years after that, and I never got used to all the commands I would use on a daily - but not hourly - basis, having to always look those up. But, as one of the other top-level posts said, what made me switch in the end were the language servers.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#70

Post by jakevoytko »

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…

I've been gradually switching towards completely using IDEs for like 8 years now, and in the past 2 or 3 I've broken free completely. Some of my symptoms are the same as yours: Frustrating package management, obvious missing gaps in functionality.

My conclusion is slightly different: I don't need a text editor anymore. I need an IDE and it's a bonus if it's a good text editor.

Efficient text editing is nice. But I spend a lot of time jumping between files, looking up definitions, reading documentation, tracing through code, debugging, comparing tests and regular code, etc. Plus all of the features that you expect: (colorblind-friendly) syntax highlighting, syntax highlighting, linting, etc. This is where the package pain comes in. I don't want to figure out how to configure the cross product of "every single IDE feature that I need" and "every single language that I use." I gave up. It's too much. I want my environment to either do it by default, or install a single plugin per language and never think about it again.

I'm not sure how Emacs can get "more modern," because being modern would likely start from the premise that you'd need to allow the core innovation of IDEs. They provide a pluggable framework to get uniform behavior across every language that you use. That ship sailed in Emacs - how do you move away from 40 years of "we ship a vanilla experience and you customize your environment completely to your own liking"?

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