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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#91

Post by abhiyerra »

evolve2k wrote: post #61
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 wi…

Not saying this is the way to do it but there is a remacs which is working on rewriting Emacs in Rust and fixing the C level issues in the process: https://github.com/remacs/remacs

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#92

Post by mrob »

FandangoRanger wrote: post #57
the-smug-one wrote: post #38

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.

If only there were projects that repackaged Emacs together with packages which adapt the program for people who prefer other keybindings. And failing that, maybe Emacs should include some facility for remapping key bindings?

I tried Ergo Emacs, because I like Xah Lee's attitude to modernization, but even somebody so willing to abandon old defaults can't make Emacs feel modern. Emacs makes assumptions like "a document has a backing file on disk" and "a cursor has a location on screen" that only make sense with obsolete hardware. The weird janky feeling is embedded too deep for any easy fix.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#93

Post by zarkov99 »

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's over 40 years old but it has fewer and fewer users younger than that. VS code is rapidly taking over it's niche and without modernization, of many kinds, emacs will die out in a generation.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#94

Post by im3w1l »

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?

Nicely formatted math. Gui designers. Diagrams.

And personally I find tabs is the most efficient design for switching between files.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#95

Post by Jtsummers »

danShumway wrote: post #84

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. - Performan…

That was touched on in the article:

> Some of the ideas found in these distributions may well merit inclusion in Emacs, but that does not happen. Emacs maintainer Eli Zaretskii complained that the creators of these distributions do not contribute their work back.

If the changes aren't being contributed back, any gain from them is lost for users of the default system. Creating an unnecessary fork within the user base, especially where the changes could be enabled via a configuration change (start with default, but prompt at first run to go to Doom Emacs or Spacemacs).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#96

Post by quadrifoliate »

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…

> emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but has stayed close to that number for years.

It is possible that "Stack Overflow surveys" select for programmers who tend not to use Emacs. For example, I use Emacs regularly and know what Stack Overflow is, but have never taken one of these surveys.

I'm not even sure how they survey developers. Ask on some crufty mailing list and you probably will get a completely different distribution from the one they showed.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#97

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zarkov99 wrote: post #93
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's over 40 years old but it has fewer and fewer users younger than that. VS code is rapidly taking over it's niche and without modernization, of many kinds, emacs will die out in a generation.

I've used Emacs for 33 of those 40+ years, and I agree with that until the word "without".

You don't mean "modernization". You mean "without it changing". And the answer is yes, it will die out.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#98

Post by oblio »

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…

I've personally known 2 Emacs users in my ~15 years in the industry. I've worked in Europe for various startups and a bunch of corporations. Both of them used it as a sort of hobby/side editor, their main money maker was an IDE (VS, IntelliJ).

I've probably worked with 500 developers, if not more.

My personal impression is that Emacs is like the Yeti of programming editors. Everybody has heard about it, few claim to have seen it and even fewer still can claim to have proof of the sighting :-)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#99

Post by oblio »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #96
Miraste wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but has stayed close to that number for years. It is possible that "Stack Overflow surveys" select for programmers who tend not to use Emacs. For example, I use Emacs regularly and know what Stack Overflow is, but have never taken one of these surveys. I'm not even sure how they survey developers. Ask on some crufty mailing list and you probably will…

They probably just send a newsletter to StackOverflow users :-)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#100

Post by heavyset_go »

I've been checking out alternative text editors, and was recently impressed with micro[1].

The only issue I have with it is that it doesn't handle text navigation with the Ctrl + arrow key combinations that let you jump to the start and end of words.

There's a small revival of modernized text-based apps now that Go and Rust gained adoption. I've even come across an editor written in Nim, called moe[2].

Are there other editors out there that are worth trying out?

[1] https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

[2] https://github.com/fox0430/moe/

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