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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#81

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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…

Meanwhile, I’m always amazed how, on HN threads about Emacs, people talk about preferring the Vi family of editors. When I installed Linux on my computer two decades ago and had to learn *nix, my own (totally subjective) impression was that the Vi family was regarded as clunky and half-obsolete, about as much of a pain as editing in ed. As I began to contribute to the Free Software community, most of the other people I interacted with seemed to use Emacs. So, to find out that Vi is still used and loved in 2020 has been a shock.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#82

Post by robocat »

Jtsummers wrote: post #52
beagle3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

C-x and C-c make some sense as cut and copy. But C-v, C-z, C-y as paste, undo, and redo just make little sense. The first two make sense for their proximity to x and c in the QWERTY layout. y only makes sense if it happened to be unassigned. Keyboard shortcuts will always fall into one of two categories: That makes perfect sense (usually mapping to a mnemonic like C-a for "select all"); That's totally arbitrary (C-y)…

Mnemonic keyboard shortcuts must be a bastard to learn if you don’t speak English.

And shortcuts based on finger distance must suck for anyone using a non-qwerty keyboard (especially a non-latin character based language!).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#83

Post by liability »

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…

Nov.el is my favorite ebook reader.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#84

Post by danShumway »

Do the defaults in Emacs matter, at all? Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and dozens of other default configs already exist. I've been using Emacs for years, I never learned the default keybindings. I used Evil mode right from the start.

I just don't see this as a real problem.

A small (incomplete) list of real problems:

- No timeline on Wayland support, Wayland will likely require substantial work and refactoring.

- Performance issues on long lines of text.

- Architectural/technical debt.

- etc...

Emacs is, fundamentally, a power-user editor. There are problems to solve, but "I had to change the default fonts" isn't one of them. Why would you use Emacs in the first place if you weren't interested in changing the default fonts? Maybe I'm out of touch, but I would never recommend a new Emacs user to just download Emacs directly. I assume they're starting with someone else's config.

Emacs fills a specific niche that other text editors today still aren't satisfying, and it should continue to fill that niche. What other text editor can I use as a window manager?

I haven't checked in a while, but I think Spacemacs solves literally every single problem that they're talking about, including prompting users whether they'd like to enable CUA mode by default. But Spacemacs can't solve the Wayland problem.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#85

Post by JdeBP »

liability wrote: post #73
kzemek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 com…

Vim drops noobs straight into normal mode, meaning the moment they start trying to type they get confused. I know that's what happened to me. The arcane nature of Emacs doesn't make itself apparent nearly so fast.

Only if it isn't invoked as "evim", "eview", "vim -y", or "view -y".

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#86

Post by da39a3ee »

We should stop making the tutorial prominent and stop worshipping it. I've used Emacs for 20 years and write emacs-lisp packages and I don't use all those weird keybindings for moving around the buffer. That's what the arrow keys are for! There's an international aspect to this: those who went to school in the USA typically touch-type; but in some other countries one does not learn to touch type unless one is aiming to become what used to be called a secretary.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#87

Post by Jtsummers »

robocat wrote: post #82
Jtsummers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-x and C-c make some sense as cut and copy. But C-v, C-z, C-y as paste, undo, and redo just make little sense. The first two make sense for their proximity to x and c in the QWERTY layout. y only makes sense if it happened to be unassigned. Keyboard shortcuts will always fall into one of two categories: That makes perfect sense (usually mapping to a mnemonic like C-a for "select all"); That's totally arbitrary (C-y)…

Mnemonic keyboard shortcuts must be a bastard to learn if you don’t speak English. And shortcuts based on finger distance must suck for anyone using a non-qwerty keyboard (especially a non-latin character based language!).

Indeed. I use the Dvorak layout (a choice I made twenty years ago and have stuck with since my typing speed did improve, by virtue of finally learning to touch type properly), and many shortcuts make no sense. On the other hand, I actually found emacs much more comfortable to use.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#88

Post by jrimbault »

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…

Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here :

- 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...

- 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e...

- 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-...

- 2016: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-de...

- 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-editor

What's really amazing is vscode just appearing out of nowhere (7% in 2016, 35% in 2018). Blindsiding everyone. Cross platform, excellent to good enough UI/UX (very much inspired by Sublime Text but free), easily extensible in a widely available (and widely taught) language. For better or for worse.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#89

Post by snazz »

agumonkey wrote: post #12
BeetleB wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, to an extent I agree. If you're just using your text editor as a text editor—and you're willing to have fairly limited support for integrations and other stuff like that—worrying about market share is unnecessary. If you rely on complex, IDE-type features for languages that move quickly, you might be better-served by a more popular editor.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#90

Post by da39a3ee »

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…

The hypothesis that Emacs is used for many things is consistent with the hypothesis that Emacs usage is rare. This is because many humans have existed over the years, so a staggering array of tasks can be addressed in even a small fraction of those person-years.
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