Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toward a “modern” Emacs

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 539 posts

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#111

Post by quadrifoliate »

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…

I feel old when I see ”modern Emacs” and think “Oh, maybe they are finally either finishing off Guile Emacs, or porting the extension language to Common Lisp”.

I guess I agree that ibuffer should be part of the standard distribution. Less sure about undo-tree, but could be an option if the authors released it under appropriate licenses (I understand that contributing code to Emacs is somewhat cumbersome; although if I were smart enough to do so, I would jump through the hoops in a heartbeart).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#112

Post by fmakunbound »

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…

What’s extending VS Code like compared to Emacs?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#113

Post by BeetleB »

im3w1l wrote: post #94
efficax wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nicely formatted math.

Can you elaborate? With a keystroke, it renders a LaTeX formula inline.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#114

Post by dragandj »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #77

Though it's made great improvements in recent years, GNU Emacs, the vanilla package, is more of an unrefined platform than a more finalized product that competitors like VSCode are. SpaceEmacs is closer to such a refined product, though it's aimed at Vim users (with the 'evil' Vim-support package being front and foremost). I am not currently aware of a kind of "best-of-emacs" distribution that focuses on putting Emac…

https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#115

Post by gen220 »

rcconf wrote: post #56

After using Emacs for 10+ years, I've switched to VSCode for a really simple reason: fuzzy matching a file in a project. I've tried so many different plugins and hacks to get it to work, but it never did quite work. Searching for a filename either matches the wrong file, or new files that were freshly added are no longer there.

I’m a vim user, but I imagine there’s a similar way to do this in emacs...

The secret is piping fd into fzf and opening the selected value from fzf. You can probably write a 2-liner in elisp that shells out.

In my experience, this pipeline provides a faster and better matching experience than any IDE.

Once I got this working, I never went back to VS Code. :)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#116

Post by Igelau »

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 have a feeling the SO numbers aren't accounting for Org Mode users.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#117

Post by BeetleB »

Jtsummers wrote: post #95
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,…

The article also touched on why this is the case: Not everyone wants to assign copyright to the FSF.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#118

Post by quadrifoliate »

oblio wrote: post #98
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…

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…

Since you mention IntelliJ, is it possible that the corporations you have worked in have been heavy on Java?

JDEE (http://jdee.sourceforge.net/) exists, but even I give up on Emacs when I want to write a lot of Java (and I use Emacs for literally everything else, including JS).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#119

Post by rightbyte »

jakevoytko wrote: post #70
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 sp…

I really like using Emacs but as soon as I touch a big project I need a point and click friendly IDE with refactoring/smart search support to keep my head from spinning. It would be great with some vanilla autocomplete with a language server thing that "almost just works".

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#120

Post by mjw1007 »

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)…

A third category is those chosen for their physical position.
Post reply on HN