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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#181

Post by dybber »

baby wrote: post #157

All of these are missing the point imo. The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins and functionalities. Everything is a menu away, and fuzzy searching makes it easy to find out commands and learn their shortcuts. This whole process just doesn’t exist in emacs. To get a plugin, it’s a huge step (setting up custom elisp to get melpa) and then it’s a huge learning curve just to try a plugin.

I've used Emacs for around 14 years now, I rarely touch my configuration. There's lines in my config today, that I haven't changed since I first learned to use Emacs and set it up (e.g. keybindings, tab-width, etc.).

I like that kind of stability, makes it possible to move my focus away from the editor, towards the problems I'm trying to solve.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#182

Post by therealmocker »

I wonder what the appetite for extending the emacs "server" concept is. Treat it like an API and so that you can maintain core editor compatibility, but offer an easy way to implement UI layers that users might feel are more modern.

Could also lead to dedicated "org-mode" clients, etc.. that could leverage emacs under the hood via the API.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#183

Post by oivey »

I’ve recently switched to VS Code, and the driving issue for me was really related to the popularity of the editor. Some combination of the LSP server and the chain of emacs packages to interface with that server were constantly broken. I can’t blame the maintainers, seeing as the LSP was being implemented by a skeleton crew and the various emacs packages were abandoned short of a couple heroes fixing some of the big bugs.

I still miss things like Magit, the binds from Spacemacs, the project integration from Projectile and Ivy/Helm, and more. VS Code has some other pluses too though, like a better terminal and smooth rendering / performance. I don’t see emacs getting those features without more popularity, but I hope VS Code gets the things I miss given how many people use it.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#184

Post by agambrahma »

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…

I will refrain from commenting on the general dismissiveness in your post, and stick to one of the points you made: "Ctrl-F" being linked to "move right" is the /standard keybinding/ on macOS.

In fact, /most/ of the "standard" Emacs keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-F, Ctrl-B, Meta-F, Meta-B, even in some contexts Ctrl-K, Ctrl-Y) are /also/ the standard macOS keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#185

Post by rxhernandez »

gnulinux wrote: post #137
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…

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 cowo…

I've worked in California all my life and have worked in the following industries: medical devices, scientific devices, blockchain, and plasma physics research. I am the only person I've seen use emacs. Almost every developer I've worked with either used VS Code, Visual Studio, or uVision. Everyone else used Sublime Text, Eclipse or a JetBrains IDE.

I haven't even used emacs in years so I don't even know anyone that uses it; I stick almost exclusively to Vim (and for 8 months this was my only "IDE"), PyCharm, and WebStorm.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#186

Post by TheGrassyKnoll »

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,…

But Windows IS evil...

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#187

Post by paledot »

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 came to vim (years ago now) because I was experiencing RSI from all of the chorded keyboard shortcuts I was using in Coda. Emacs doesn't help with that, but vim does (if you `map ; :`).

Any editor feels clunky for the first week of using it, Vim and Emacs most of all. Nobody wastes the headspace in staying current on multiple editors. So I don't know that you'll ever see an objective comparison of the two. But they're both solid ways to write code, it just takes way too long to get either one dialed in to do the things we expect modern editors to do out of the box, like code completion.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#188

Post by ywei3410 »

onedognight wrote: post #158
dragandj wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first point, use emacs service + emacsclient. Starts instantly.

This and avoiding require in your .emacs. When packages are autoloaded on demand emacs starts up quickly. As a quick test try emacs -q” to see if something in your .emacs is the cause of the slowdown.

To add to this excellent point; a common culprit is not using ~use-package~ correctly to lazy-load as much as you can. I use Emacs extensively for all my languages and have loads of packages installed, but the startup time is around half-a-second on a newish Ryzen laptop running Nix from a cold restart.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#189

Post by mark_l_watson »

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…

I second gnulinux’s comment, that is amazing. I would estimate that over 1/3 of my colleagues over the years used Emacs at least once a day and for many it is their main driver.

It seems like I spend a fair amount of time mosh/tmux to remote servers and I like copying over my Emacs configuration, be up and running. Same for users of vi or vim.

VSCode has good remote server development support also, so there are great options to keep most people happy.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#190

Post by agambrahma »

I agree that "Emacs needs its NeoVim moment", where some architectural changes are needed for future longevity (I'd want it to be around for my lifetime!), but I also don't think there should be any breaking change.

I have already, over the last decade, seen incremental changes to make packaging, json-handling, concurrency, much better than they used to be.

But most encouraging of all, the "distributions" (Doom, Spacemacs) are doing some of the "market research" about what users like more, or care about more, and cataloguing the lesson learnt there would help Emacs move forward in an /incremental/ manner.

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