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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#291

Post by hexa00 »

I'm going to approach this as a pure social thing.

To me emacs fits in a way because it fits the kinda misfit/hacker mentality I had back when I started playing with computers/software.

I found emacs and linux as the coolest things in the world while everyone was thinking computers were somehow for unwanted geeks in a basement.

And honestly that did not feel me with a need to be cool, wanted or popular.

Instead I developed a sense that having to learn things the hard way, fail and continue until I got it right without regard to what others thought had a super high value.

And to me that's what emacs symbolizes, it doesn't need to be popular or cool and maybe it will die at some point but even if that would be unfortunate it will have been central to a generation of free thinking, intelligent programmers.

And now it's 2020 it's cool to be a programmer, and we're awash with learn to be a dev the easy way seminars and here's how you can deploy your app in 2 clicks...

And that's good but it doesn't mean emacs has to be that way.

I think it is way way easier instead to create a new editor with the same free software mentality. Maybe that's Theia under the Eclipse Foundation, maybe it's something else. But migrating emacs to a VSCode like popular idea is crazy, you just can't migrate all of that.

Full disclosure I worked on GDB (using emacs) and Theia (a vscode like editor) and used emacs for 15+ years mainly doing c/cpp and org mode.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#292

Post by User23 »

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).

I wouldn’t write Java in an editor that wasn’t hosted in the JVM. The advantages are simply too great. On the other hand that’s a very Lispy attitude so Emacs still influences me. And Eclipse at least has tolerable Emacs style bindings available. Still it sucks how much more of a PITA it is to create an Eclipse plug-in than to just write a page or two of elisp.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#293

Post by chipotle_coyote »

BeetleB wrote: post #286
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although I personally don't recommend it, but have you heard of Customize in Emacs? I have, I've tried it, and it's terrible compared to virtually any other editor's equivalent for editing preferences/settings. It's super hard to navigate and search, it's difficult to figure out the terminology if you don't already know it, it's unclear how various settings affect one another, and IIRC it can actually make changes…

> If I could suggest just one change to make Emacs feel more "modern," it would be to entirely redo the Customize section to make it behave more like VS Code's preference system It's probably not hard for someone to do that with Emacs - all the bits and pieces are there. I wouldn't be opposed to this. > They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was alway…

I'm not actually sure Vim has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs at this point. I've made recent attempts to make good friends with both Vim and Emacs, and have experience with Emacs 27 and Vim 8. In my hopefully not too cynical observation, Vim fans tend to overestimate Emacs's complexity and capacity to be confusing (even saying this as someone who has admitted to being confused by Emacs!), while Emacs fans tend to underestimate modern Vim's capability.

I am not sure whether I just have bad luck with Emacs extensions. :) I suspect it depends on what languages you're delving into; I found trying to get HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript modes all playing nicely together (literally, since the same file could technically have all four, with a secondary template language thrown in for good measure!) challenging. But that particular adventure was a while ago. (My most recent attempt was with Spacemacs, which, uh, I'll just say it has some great color schemes.)

Re: Emacs Lisp: well, I did say "often feels like," not "actually is." :) I'm sure you're right; it's just that sense that a lot of early problems get solved by "to do the thing you want to do, paste this code into your init file," and getting past the feeling that you're assembling a configuration you don't reallllllly understand -- and thus may not be able to debug if something goes wrong -- can be a hurdle.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#294

Post by hardwaregeek »

There's this response that VSCode is just another editor in the vein of Sublime/BBEdit/Atom, that will be killed by a newer, shinier competitor, while emacs persists. That's a great story—indeed it was told to me by a teacher who proselytized emacs.

But what if you're wrong?

What if VSCode is a massive challenger? For one, no editor has had the backing of a major tech corporation. Sure, XCode and Visual Studio exist, but they were specific to a particular stack. Second, language servers aren't something that can be elisped away. Stuff like multiple cursors are a few elisp lines away, but real, semantic knowledge of code is a lot harder to replicate. Emacs has language server clients but man they're annoying.

I'm an emacs user under the age of 40. All the other ones I know stem from this one teacher who taught emacs. I'm not sure how many more there are. Emacs is a fun editor and I'll certainly use the keybindings wherever I go, but it baffles me that people can look at emacs and think it's accessible at all to beginners.

Go ahead, try downloading emacs (have a fun time figuring out which version to download for macOS) and using it without any config. It's terrible. Bland, plain white, looking like it's from the 70's. M-x just dumps you into an empty text box with no help. Navigating directories involves typing out entire directory names. Getting basic stuff like goto definition requires either setting up eglot/lsp-mode or ggtags.

Emacs is great if you invest the time, but it's getting less and less clear whether the investment is worth it. To return to my question, what if you're wrong? Emacs will die. This wouldn't be the worst fate. It's had a long, respectable life. But I'd miss it.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#295

Post by j-james »

konjin wrote: post #264
snazz wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the mean time I have actual work I need to get done. That's probably how most VS Code users feel about learning Emacs after reading about it on HN :)

I doubt they have had 20 years of using to it though.

Certainly, but that's where the not-so-steep learning curve helps.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#296

Post by throwaway8941 »

ryukafalz wrote: post #205
quadrifoliate wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs users are probably more likely to unsubscribe to newsletters that they did not sign up for :) (On a side rant, I really dislike how a lot of websites have normalized “create an account on a website” to mean “Sign up for receiving a plethora of emails about everything the website and its creators are up to these days”)

>On a side rant, I really dislike how a lot of websites have normalized “create an account on a website” to mean “Sign up for receiving a plethora of emails about everything the website and its creators are up to these days” Hear, hear. If I get an email from a company whose newsletter I didn't sign up for, I immediately unsubscribe... but I really shouldn't have to.

I was expecting you to say "I immediately mark it as spam". Do it, treat unsolicited newsletters like the spam they are. If enough people do this, it creates significant problems for the authors of such email.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#297

Post by noidesto »

rcconf wrote: post #56

After using Emacs for 10+ years, I've switched to VSCode for a really simple reason: fuzzy matching a file in a project. I've tried so many different plugins and hacks to get it to work, but it never did quite work. Searching for a filename either matches the wrong file, or new files that were freshly added are no longer there.

Projectile + helm (powered by fd) has worked wonders for me.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#298

Post by coliveira »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #294

There's this response that VSCode is just another editor in the vein of Sublime/BBEdit/Atom, that will be killed by a newer, shinier competitor, while emacs persists. That's a great story—indeed it was told to me by a teacher who proselytized emacs. But what if you're wrong? What if VSCode is a massive challenger? For one, no editor has had the backing of a major tech corporation. Sure, XCode and Visual Studio exist,…

> no editor has had the backing of a major tech corporation

Eclipse was supported by IBM since the beginning (in fact it inherited the ideas from IBM VisualAge Smalltalk).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#299

Post by abecode »

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…

For me the killer feature of using emacs on a Mac is having a dedicated command c/v/x/z for copy/paste/cut/undo that's separate from ctrl c/v/x/z in emacs (and readline shell bindings in general).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#300

Post by ashtonkem »

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…

Heavily language dependent. I used nothing but Emacs until I switched over to Java, where IntelliJ is king. The level of Emacs usage I’ve seen depended a lot on what language was being used, it seemed much more popular for Python users than Ruby, for example.
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