121–130 of 539 posts
I have been an Emacs user for 20+ years, and I don't use editors that can't be configured to use Emacs key bindings. Luckily IDEs like Visual Studio can be configured to mimic Emacs. To me the issues that make Emacs not modern are: (1) Slow startup. (2) Buggy language modes. (The ones that come with it are good, but third party ones such as web-mode are buggy.) and (3) No intellisense out of the box.
Here's a new user perspective on Emacs (based on memory; I actually have more experience than this): I open emacs-gtk. A document is already loaded. I try to type something, and every letter I type gives the unhelpful error message "[letter] is undefined". I guess this means I need to create a new document first. I open the File menu, and see "Visit New File...". "Visit" sounds weird, and the "..." is suspicious, but…
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.
The article makes some interesting points, to me, though, I think the Emacs devs need to have a discussion with themselves if they even want to go here. Here's what I see as an outsider if I'm a Windows users and want to give this great emacs editor I've heard so much about a try: First off, I search for emacs, I land on a page with a Windows link. I click that link, I get a rant about how Windows is evil. Ok, fine,…
> it teaches me is some odd-for-me commands to navigate that as a user are all new and unlike every editor I've used. That is the point. If it worked the same as every editor you've used, why switch? The point why Emacs is better is because it's different. These things need to be learned. Otherwise, Emacs can't help you. It would be like people complaining that playing a guitar is different than pushing the play butt…
The article makes some interesting points, to me, though, I think the Emacs devs need to have a discussion with themselves if they even want to go here. Here's what I see as an outsider if I'm a Windows users and want to give this great emacs editor I've heard so much about a try: First off, I search for emacs, I land on a page with a Windows link. I click that link, I get a rant about how Windows is evil. Ok, fine,…
> it teaches me is some odd-for-me commands to navigate that as a user are all new and unlike every editor I've used. That is the point. If it worked the same as every editor you've used, why switch? The point why Emacs is better is because it's different. These things need to be learned. Otherwise, Emacs can't help you. It would be like people complaining that playing a guitar is different than pushing the play butt…
I spent weeks trying to switch, but ultimately I found the experience frustrating. UIs follow the same patterns for a reason, it makes it easier for users to adopt the tech.
The biggest draw for me was org-mode with org-babel. I've never seen anything else like it
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> 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…
The idea of copying current UI trends (dark theme, burger menu) however made me think of that quote saying that the best way to anticipate the future is to invent it.
By imitating others you are not modern, you already are behind.
Doing the same thing but only slightly better won't attract much users - Emacs should have learned that from its victories against its clones. Doing something different for the sake of being different won't attract much users either. The challenge - and the opportunity - is to do things differently in order to make something significantly better (vim cough vim).
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> 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…
I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid. I've been an Emacs user for over 20 years. I like it, and find it productive. But it's stuck in a rut, in a very similar manner to Perl 5. If that isn't addressed, it will fade into the background. I'd argue that's already happened. None of my coworkers in any of the jobs I've worked in have used it, and that includes academia and various industries. It seems to be restrict…
> (I'm not against CUA bindings by default - merely pointing out a misconception you have).
And you respond with:
> I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid.
And then you write a whole comment about how CUA is better.
Which argument did I make that you don't buy? Why is this a reply to my comment?
> I do think it's well worth a look at present-day alternatives and to make sure it doesn't fall behind.
In all my jobs that used IDEs (including JetBrains's excellent stuff), I used both the IDE and Emacs - the latter for text editing, etc. The former for all the goodies it brings (navigation, etc). There's no law saying it has to be one or the other. IDEs becoming very popular in no way threatens Emacs.
> Because I think it actually has fallen behind, and it needs to get its act together to retain its relevance.
I could really easily write a whole article on all the features Emacs has that many more popular editors don't have, and then end the article with "Those other editors are falling behind."
We have to clearly delineate what "falling behind" means, and whether it is relevant. VS Code gaining in popularity doesn't necessarily impact Emacs. In my career I've met an order of magnitude more Vim users, and Emacs is not the worse because of it. Emacs's capabilities have grown much faster than Vim's has, and Emacs has a lot more users than it used to. Furthermore, most Vim users I've encountered at work are not fairly advanced users: They just need something to edit files with. Having them switch to Emacs will neither help them nor the Emacs community.
I don't mind some of the proposed changes (nicer defaults, revamping the tutorial, etc). But I really don't want a mindless goal of increasing user counts. More users will not make Emacs gain more capabilities. Passionate users will.
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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.