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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#131

Post by TylerE »

neltnerb wrote: post #72
wtetzner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t even need to fork it. Just have write a .emacs file that new users can copy to their home directory that sets all of that stuff up.

I think I still have the .emacs file I inherited from an upperclassman. It had better syntax highlighting than what was built in at the time =)

See, this is what I hate about emacs.

It feels like a spring loaded bundle of magic that will explode if I look at it wrong, and, having exploded, I will never ever ever get it put back the way it was.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#132

Post by acqq »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #124
dragandj wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Really? The point why Emacs is better is that it has different keyboard shortcuts?

That is what I never understood -- I've implemented exactly this "which editor emulation do you want to use" and "edit your own bindings" for one Windows product containing editor in early nineties. It wasn't hard. The default was, of course, the "least surprising" for the platform, but it also allowed other popular editors then. If there's anything that can reduce friction to the new user, it's that: a beginner can use the actions he already knows how to do. Let him just the ability to access those that are unique -- for these he anyway doesn't have any reflexes.

My biggest eyeroll whenever I looked at Emacs "help" (or any other, Emacs is not unique in that approach) was "and then you use Meta key." Well I don't think that anybody bought a physical keyboard with a key on which it was written "Meta" for a least 30 years. How about recognizing that for the beginners?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key

"But, meta is not always the same key" I hear every time -- fine, but that should also be the part of "advanced stuff." Just let people know that they initially have Alt, Ctrl and Escape where on the keycaps Alt, Ctrl and Escape are written.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#133

Post by schwartzworld »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #118
oblio wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

JS development in IntelliJ/WebStorm is an amazing experience. The refactoring features alone make it easy to write code without worrying about details like "where does the file go" or "what should I name this". You can get the code working and rename / move code with a single click later on, knowing the refactor will propagate through the app.

The intellisense is amazing too. Start typing a method name and you see arguments with type annotations. it's overkill for scripting, but working on tangled legacy code it's very helpful.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#134

Post by spudlyo »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #81
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…

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 think the thing about Vi and Vim that has the most value in 2020 is not the software itself, but rather the keyboard-centric composable modal editing system that they popularized.

Some of the growth that Emacs has enjoyed over the past several years is from folks who want the Vim style modal editing in an editor as customizable and extensible as Emacs. Emacs "distributions" such as Doom and Spacemacs cater to these folks.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#135

Post by gnulinux »

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…

Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it seems like there were more vim users in school than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current coworkers use Emacs and I work in Boston, MA.

Personally: I cannot imagine programming without emacs, to me programming is so strongly associated with emacs...

Of course, I also understand that it's all personal preference.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#136

Post by mrob »

catern wrote: post #122
mrob wrote: post #53

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…

Responding in your same spirit: Did you notice where it said "Tutorial" in the starting document you ignored, or where it said "Tutorial" in the help menu you ignored?

Most likely yes. But the only reason I tried Emacs in the first place was because I knew it could do complicated things. I expected "Tutorial" to be the place to get started with those complicated things. It didn't occur to me that a tutorial would be necessary for such seemingly simple operations.

I did later go on to read tutorials, and I put many hours into customizing my .emacs file, but I always felt like I was fighting the system. Emacs is designed for hardware that's now museum pieces, and those design decisions have pervasive effects that make it impossible to configure Emacs to act like modern software.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#137

Post by gnulinux »

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…

This is amazing.

I already wrote this to another comment, but quoting myself:

> Is this a USA vs the rest thing? I've worked in many startups in the US and almost everyone uses emacs. Last few years, VSCode has been getting popular though. I had a similar experience when I was a student in UC Berkeley, although it seems like there were more vim users in school than in industry. Anyway, pretty much all my current coworkers use Emacs and I work in Boston, MA.

> Personally: I cannot imagine programming without emacs, to me programming is so strongly associated with emacs...

> Of course, I also understand that it's all personal preference.

I don't know if there is a way to prove that I'm lying. :)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#138

Post by tgbugs »

Glad to see that other observers have keyed in on the discoverability aspect. I tried to highlight it in [1]. Unfortunately I haven't been able to hop back into the discussion there, and things have been moving at a fantastic pace.

The longer I have been working to develop processes and systems, the more I have come to appreciate defaults that do not change. It is interesting to see some of the new *coin and blockchain folks in their dark forest threads worrying about what happens if the interpreter changes its semantics and lamenting that contracts are meaningless if the interpreter can change. That is what standards are for, and that is what the "backwards geezers" are trying to do for Emacs since it doesn't have a standard, only social norms. I'm not too too worried though, since there are many sensible people in the community who understand why changing defaults can destroy trust and waste the time of millions of people. I am also not worried because there are many creative solutions to the problem of how to attract and maintain new users in a way that they can come to appreciate the benefits of stability.

1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00...

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#139

Post by bitmunk »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #124
dragandj wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Really? The point why Emacs is better is that it has different keyboard shortcuts?

Nope, it's the ecosystem around them.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#140

Post by AceJohnny2 »

dragandj wrote: post #114
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

Thanks! I had forgotten about Emacs Prelude.
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