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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#311

Post by logicprog »

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…

I use emacs for everything. I'm a hobbyist and computer science major (sophomore, undergraduate). Hell, I use emacs to edit the markdown that gets rendered to a predefined Latex template for my philosophy classes!

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#312

Post by Fishysoup »

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 would like it to be multithreaded and for Org mode to have some more UI features (and I think a lot of people would - at least the former). From what I understand it's really hard to do that by building on the existing C base ELisp base.

Unpopular opinion: we should write the "new" Emacs in Julia (and maybe Rust).

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#313

Post by AceJohnny2 »

theCodeStig wrote: post #301
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…

Doom Emacs is much more polished than Spacemacs, and yet lighter weight.

But Doom Emacs presents itself as:

"Doom is a configuration framework for GNU Emacs tailored for Emacs bankruptcy veterans who want less framework in their frameworks, a modicum of stability (and reproducibility) from their package manager, and the performance of a hand rolled config (or better). It can be a foundation for your own config or a resource for Emacs enthusiasts to learn more about our favorite operating system."

I haven't tried it myself, but it doesn't sound like a packaged distribution, more of a framework, no?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#314

Post by dmix »

ashtonkem wrote: post #302
jrimbault wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add links to the SO surveys mentionned here : - 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e... - 2018: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#development-e... - 2017: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-_-... - 2016: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#technology-de... - 2015: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015#tech-editor What's real…

I remain utterly perplexed by the popularity of VS Code, to me it basically does nothing well, but does a bunch of things mediocrely.

It’s surprisingly easy to grind performance to a halt in VSCode using the extensions (even on a modern machine of course) much like using a browser with extensions (but worse).

That said the only reason I use VSCode instead of Vin is when I program in Typescript because the support is outstanding, always cutting edge, and super easy to set up. Code is ideal for frontend js programming in general with lower investment.

Similar to how awesome Emacs was for Clojure and Lisps in general.

But nothing will peel me away from (neo)Vim for generally everything else. I love how fast, portable, and perfectly customized I’ve made it over the years.

The difference with vim vs emacs vs VSCode is probably like the value with the community size and plug-in support. Just like programming languages become great through having great libraries and frameworks and tutorials etc, being popular has tons of value. After simply being good at all the foundational stuff.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#315

Post by Qwertious »

robocat wrote: post #13

I love this: “Or, as Richard Stallman put it”: ‘It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.’ It is interesting to see a comment that is 100% at odds with the brutal evolution of ideas that occurs in a good ecology of software. If the same mindset applies to the rest of emacs then they really stand no chance or real progress. (edit: the rest of emacs, and not j…

Yes, what really pisses me off about emacs is the mind-numbing arrogance - they're basically saying "people ought not to have broke from our button scheme, so we'll just ignore it to our users' detriment!".

There's this implicit argument that convention is some sort of monarchist hierarchy where the successor mustbenamed as heir first, and what convention is most common is somehow irrelevant. It's infuriating.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#316

Post by hardwaregeek »

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…

That's great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don't know or care that it's one of the most successful text editors or that it's been around for 40 years. They care about being able to write code effectively. And emacs doesn't let users write code effectively by modern standards. Sure, after boatloads of configuration and tinkering it does, but it's unclear if it's worth it.

Forking it is also missing the point. There's plenty of forks with dark coloring schemes and predefined packages. Spacemacs, Doom emacs, etc. The issue is that most people hear about emacs and try to download emacs, not Spacemacs, not Doom. They're then greeted by an unfriendly UI and confusing commands and dammit it doesn't even autocomplete JavaScript by default.

Dark color schemes and proper right click functionality might seen dumb, but they're one easy step towards making emacs seem like an editor for the 21st century and not something your dad used on a Lisp machine in the 80's.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#318

Post by stingraycharles »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #316
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…

That's great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don't know or care that it's one of the most successful text editors or that it's been around for 40 years. They care about being able to write code effectively. And emacs doesn't let users write code effectively by modern standards. Sure, after boatloads of configuration and tinkering it does, but it's unclear if it's worth it. Forking it is…

Yeah I think this is on point. The core maintainers are always kind of resisting changing things to more sane defaults, which is a pity.

I recently had the experience of a friend of mine, a data scientist, tell me he tried to use emacs but just couldn’t get it to work. When I asked how he installed it, he was like “well I just downloaded it, and started tinkering a bit with my config”. After which he just ditched it, he accepted that the learning curve was just to steep.

The idea that there are these whole starter packs never crossed his mind. I referred him to a few, and he suddenly got much more productive and has been a happy emacs user ever since.

Moral of the story: at the very least, users should be made aware of these starter packs much more prominently when downloading or installing emacs. Alternatively, fix the defaults.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#319

Post by oaiey »

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…

Same here. 20 years, Europe, corporate and open source projects, zero emacs users. Seen vim, notepad++, sublime, uedit, atom and vscode. And all types of fat ides

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#320

Post by tptacek »

It's hard for me to imagine a world in which the Emacs core team has much to do with the look-and-feel of the Emacs that gets new users to adopt it. Haven't Spacemacs and Doom have done more to recruit Emacs users than anything the core team has done in a decade? Maybe "dark theme" and "lots of menus" aren't the problems the core team should be worrying about; leave that to other projects?

The idea that what Emacs needs is more or differently organized menus is pretty funny though. Maybe if we could just get all the customize groups into a single tree view it would all make sense to people!

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