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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#141

Post by mplanchard »

liability wrote: post #23
SeanLuke wrote: post #18

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, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left. I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, un…

As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was. As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that…

Yeah honestly I think a config “wizard” when you start up to get some basic standard stuff ready to go, like package installs, themes, evil/CUA/traditional keybindings, LSP stuff, some major modes, etc. would go a long way towards making it less intimidating and more productive out of the gate.

Also some kind of popup help for keybindings like you get with the Doom/Spacemacs leader key would I think help a lot.

I certainly don’t think that changing the color scheme or other “chrome” improvements are going to make any meaningful difference, and honestly the discussion in the article sounded kind of condescending, assuming that the only reason people might find emacs difficult to get started with is because it doesn’t have cat videos or a dark color scheme.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#142

Post by wrycoder »

BeetleB wrote: post #7

> There was some discussion of adopting the Solarized color palette in particular. As Dmitry Gutov pointed out, though, Solarized makes for a rather low-contrast experience This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark. For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast…

To each his own - there are many choices, easily installed:

https://emacsthemes.com/

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#143

Post by sokoloff »

gnulinux wrote: post #135
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…

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 programmi…

From your username and Boston's proximity to MIT and FSF, it's possible that your experience isn't totally representative. :)

Mine isn't either and I find it hard to imagine owning a computer (or using git beyond the very basic operations) without having access to emacs, but it does seem likely that coworkers won't have completely independent text editor preferences. I would expect to see more VS and VSCode in the Redmond, WA area, even at places that aren't Microsoft.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#144

Post by throwaway2938a »

SeanLuke wrote: post #18

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, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left. I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, un…

Don't know what platform you are on, but on Mac with the GUI version, standard cut-copy-paste keybindings all work, as well as select-all, save, close window (Cmd + w), undo.

Obviously they don't work in terminals.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#145

Post by dragandj »

acqq wrote: post #132
amadeuspagel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Emacs, you can configure literally anything, including the keybindings. Some people use Emacs with Vim keybindings (Evil, Spacemacs, Doom).

Now, for me, typical Emacs keybindings, of which the majority is defined in 3rd party packages are very logical, while Vim's are not. But the users who prefer the Vim way did they work and configured Emacs however they liked.

OTOH, of the million people who complain and ask for Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste and whatnot, I've never seen anyone who did the 2 minutes or two hours of work, went into a configuration, and changed these keys. Why's that so, if that's such a great idea?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#146

Post by spudlyo »

edw wrote: post #103
JacksonGariety wrote: post #4

The Emacs community should start by perfecting lsp-mode so that it can compete with VS Code in terms of functionality. That will simultaneously keep power users from switching AND bring in people from other "easy to use" editors that lack such functionality.

I basically gave up on Emacs and switched to a combination of VS Code and old-school vi for Go and everything else, respectively. Finding an effing theme that allowed me to program in Go in a terminal without making LSP’s overlays unreadable was nearly impossible. I spent days trying to make this work. I’ve used Emacs since 1991.

This is possible, but it's a bit of a pain. One problem is that the popular themes cater to GUI Emacs users where you have 24-bit color depth. On the terminal this gets approximated to one of the available 256 colors, and this approximation is often not great. This makes themes on the terminal look weird sometimes.

With some work, you can enable 24-bit color support in TTY emacs, which solves this problem. Combine this with some work to either tweak or remove the more obnoxious LSP overlays and you can have a fairly good LSP experience on the TTY.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#147

Post by tsuujin »

zarkov99 wrote: post #102
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are some of the changes you would want to see?

I think adopting cua-mode as the default would go a long way towards reducing the initial friction for new users.

Most of the time when I try to get people to adopt emacs, they abandon it because it feels like a huge task to relearn basic text manipulation. They never get to actually see what makes emacs good because they don't feel compelled to get past the initial bump.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#148

Post by jorams »

math0ne wrote: post #5

I think if you could easily install and use emacs to edit a text file with no knowledge it's userbase would grow exponentially overnight.

You can. By default it boots up with a menu bar and toolbar, with familiar buttons to open and save files. Most keys do exactly what you expect.

This does not affect the size of the userbase much. If your needs are that simple, just stick to any basic editor you're already familiar with.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#149

Post by liability »

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!).

The P and V operations on semaphores are from Dutch. I find this difficult, "The V kind of looks like a down arrow.. but wait no that's increment. The P could mean plus.. wait no that's decrement..."

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#150

Post by liability »

JdeBP wrote: post #85
liability wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

True, though a noob wouldn't know how to invoke it like that.
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