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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#171

Post by ssivark »

_odey wrote: post #169

"Some of the ideas found in these distributions may well merit inclusion in Emacs, but that does not happen." 1. Which ideas are they referring to exactly? Can't upstream something if you don't know what they want... 2. How do you even get approved to send code to FSF owned projects? I read somewhere you need to send a copy of your employment contract for them to determine you can assign copyright to them. But what a…

There’s a healthy Emacs community on Reddit (r/emacs) where you can find answers to these questions and more, if you prefer that to the Emacs mailing list (which is the definitive place for such questions).

From what I’ve seen, folks on the mailing list do generally welcome & encourage contributions upstream (Stallman, especially) but it does sometimes take a little more effort to convince people about the value of a new feature/package, and then iterate on a solution so that it doesn’t break decades of accumulated use cases (the perils of success).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#172

Post by konjin »

zarkov99 wrote: post #165
bJGVygG7MQVF8c wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a generation, vim and emacs will still be around with their minuscule but loyal user bases of tinkerers and VS code will have long been replaced by something newer and flashier.

Why? How are either of them superior to VS Code?

I can run them on a breadboard.

An exaggeration, but not a large one.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#173

Post by mdaniel »

zarkov99 wrote: post #165
bJGVygG7MQVF8c wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a generation, vim and emacs will still be around with their minuscule but loyal user bases of tinkerers and VS code will have long been replaced by something newer and flashier.

Why? How are either of them superior to VS Code?

"Superior" for sure isn't the word I'd use, almost every one of the editors and IDEs make a bunch of trade-offs that appeal to different audiences

IMHO, the barrier to entry for modification for both emacs and vim is much lower than their competition: evaluate text in a buffer, observe change to your editor

I don't know of any other tooling has that immediate feedback loop remeniscient of the old JS in HTML (or the dev tools console, as apples to apples) approachability

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#174

Post by alan_n »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #75

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,…

The saddest thing is its easier to just install it from WSL and use something an X server and it runs faster.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#175

Post by ssivark »

BeetleB wrote: post #168
tsuujin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But here's the question: If Emacs defaulted to CUA, how many of those people would get to see Emacs's goodness? CUA alone doesn't get you there. To do most of the things that make Emacs stand out involves a fair amount of learning (and possibly customizing). You have to put in some amount of effort before you get its benefits. While I certainly don't mind making simple things easier (e.g. CUA mode), I also see that d…

> If someone is not willing to learn how to enable CUA mode in the config file, then it is highly unlikely they will ever learn to use the features that make Emacs salient.

I think that’s uncharitable. For a newbie low on confidence it’s often death by a thousand (paper) cuts: CUA mode, Surprising undo model, How to download packages, How do I enable fringes/margins, Windows-vs-frames, etc.

Each small change has a cognitive tax, and allowing users to feel psychologically comfortable and add tweaks slowly will make the learning curve much gentler.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the strongest indicator of whether someone sticks with Emacs is whether they have access to an Emacs expert with whom, or a community where, they feel comfortable being a newbie.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#176

Post by morelisp »

MinusGix wrote: post #159
quadrifoliate wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them. I find this difficult to understand for people who use the terminal. The keybindings are the exact same for most terminals by default, since they use readline. Want to go to the end of your command? `Ctrl-E`. Want to go to the beginning? `Ctrl-A`. Want to search backwards through history? `Ctrl-R` (same thing you would do while searching bac…

Personally, out of those I've only used Ctrl-R in the terminal. I just use the Home/End keys to navigate to the start/end of lines. I was actually surprised to read that Ctrl-E and Ctrl-A would do that. I usually expect Ctrl-A to select all, and don't really expect anything from Ctrl-E. (Though, I'd be surprised if home/end didn't work in Emacs, I'm just saying I've never used those readline keybinds).

Home/End should go to the start/end of the file, not the line.

Oh you’re a Windows or Linux user? Too bad, now you need to get used to modern key bindings like OS X has.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#177

Post by agambrahma »

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…

It has definitely been this way _as far back as I can remember_ (at least the last two decades).

There have always been popular tools. Most of them haven't stuck around though.

Emacs has.

I wouldn't recommend using it right away though. Instead, I'd recommended accumulating some pain by using other popular editor-like,workflow-like,manipulation-like tools, because that might be the only way to appreciate what Emacs brings to the table.

(though I have to acknowledge VSCode's achievement, gaining massive adoption in what has always been a fragmented space)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#178

Post by badsectoracula »

For me a "modern Emacs" would basically be Notepad++ with more advanced features and programmability. The few times i tried Emacs (and i actually used it for a bit back in the early 2000s on a crappy Pentium 1 laptop i was given - and yes, i did felt the "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" meme of the 90s, though it wasn't that bad :-P) over the years i always dislike how it just doesn't mix with the native environment at all (be it Mac OS X or Windows... Linux doesn't really have a native environment and interestingly the longest i used emacs -that laptop- was under Linux :-P). Also for some reason it always felt a bit sluggish - you'd think with faster CPUs (and Emacs not having to follow fads - unlike, e.g. browsers) it'd be faster, but it always felt sluggish to me no matter what.

In general i like the idea of Emacs: a fully programmable editor that can be extended as much as you want. I just do not like the current application of that idea.

I mentioned Notepad++ because that is the editor i'm using the last few years and i like how fast it is (it opens instantly even with hundreds of files/tabs open - that it remembers the open files from last session and remembers changes in unsaved/new files is also very useful because i use it often for taking short lived notes) and how few resources it uses (it currently only uses ~15MB with a few tends of files open). But it does feel limited with pretty much zero way to customize its behavior - it is basically someone's custom configuration over Scintilla hardcoded in an executable.

However what i really like about it is that it uses (almost) the same keybindings i've used for decades and it looks and feels like a proper native Windows application like the applications i've used for decades. It basically lets me take full advantage of all the knowledge and experience i've developed over the years instead of expecting for me to throw that away and instead spend time learn how to do mostly the same stuff in a different way. And it is also very lightweight, did i mention that? I think i did, but it deserves repeat.

(the reason i use NPP is also why i do not care about VSCode or Sublime... they both feel alien and while Sublime is supposedly fast, i do not like its UI - also i do not think it is as programmable as Emacs or VSCode, but i might be wrong there...)

Perhaps there is Notepad++-alike which is also programmable and more powerful, but i just do not know it.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#179

Post by rpdillon »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #111
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…

ibuffer is part of the standard distribution, it's just not called by C-x C-b by default (that's bound to list-buffers instead).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#180

Post by loulouxiv »

zarkov99 wrote: post #165
bJGVygG7MQVF8c wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a generation, vim and emacs will still be around with their minuscule but loyal user bases of tinkerers and VS code will have long been replaced by something newer and flashier.

Why? How are either of them superior to VS Code?

I am more accustomed to vim than emacs. Some things I painfully miss when using something else than vim : quick and easy shortcuts to jump around the file, delete words/blocks/parenthesis, place marks to jump between parts of one or multiple files, macros, filtering parts of the file through external command...
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