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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#321

Post by oaiey »

ashtonkem wrote: post #303
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…

What language? Some languages have Emacs usage in the range of 0%, such as Java and C#.

That is very fair question. In my experience of html, css, js/ts, C#, VB, java, php, c/c++ and python I have never seen any emacs users in 20 years. I think it is really a language and region cut going maybe back to the universities supporting lisp or something else

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#322

Post by dybber »

baby wrote: post #212
dybber wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a downside necessarily, but I can imagine that life would get very stressful if you're ever to lose your custom configuration for emacs.

It’s in a public git repository

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#323

Post by bitexploder »

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…

There is this one concept. I can’t get away from it. Comprehension bandwidth. Emacs is an amazing piece of software. I have probably used it more than any other piece of software over 20 years. The marginal utility of Emacs over pycharm or Gedit does not exist. Most programmers, if they are being honest, can be just as effective in notepad. Modern IDE that understand their problem domain provide much more utility. These are simple facts. We type characters, they do stuff. It don’t take a fancy editor to do that.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#324

Post by BeetleB »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #293
BeetleB wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> while Emacs fans tend to underestimate modern Vim's capability.

I don't doubt vim is very powerful for things like programming, but can I use it to automatically scan my emails for keywords and make TODOs out of them (in just a few lines of code)? Can I use vim to compute derivatives of math functions and automatically insert them into LaTeX documents? And so on.

Don't look at Emacs merely as a programming editor. It's a playground for anything textual.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#325

Post by Qwertious »

nobody9999 wrote: post #196
rleigh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid. I've been an Emacs user for over 20 years. I like it, and find it productive. But it's stuck in a rut, in a very similar manner to Perl 5. If that isn't addressed, it will fade into the background. I'd argue that's already happened. None of my coworkers in any of the jobs I've worked in have used it, and that includes academia and various industries. It seems to be restrict…

>The keybindings need to be fixed. CUA has been the norm for what, 35 years at this point. M-x cua-mode Oh, and you're welcome.

Thatcs not the norm. That's an off-by-default feature that doesn't display its existence to people who would use it.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#326

Post by kungtotte »

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.

This kind of ties back in to the point of the article.

For people who have used $EDITOR for 20+ years there's little incentive to change to something else, but if you want to bring in fresh eyes to your project so that there'll be enough people around in another 20 years to maintain the whole thing it behoves you to think about attracting those people.

Sane defaults and being more approachable is a good way to do that.

Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#327

Post by lgrapenthin »

Why make Emacs another non-Emacs editor? Having mentored people (programming Clojure) who tried to learn Emacs via Spacemacs or some other "make it dumb" package, even after 6 months, they understood nothing about Emacs. They couldn't solve problems not solved by the "make it dumb" package. While I appreciate the effort going into these packages, I don't see them meeting their goal: Helping people to learn Emacs. They only help people to not learn Emacs while using it like a standard editor.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#328

Post by andeee23 »

konjin wrote: post #269
JoshTriplett wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs has a steep learning curve and that's good. You need a moat to keep the barbarians from destroying your kingdom. Most of the emacs community radiates that same attitude, which is one reason it stays where it is and doesn't flourish.

Yes, it's wonderful the community is small and technically capable.

A community can be technically capable without being full of elitists. Just look at Clojure.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#329

Post by TeMPOraL »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #296
ryukafalz wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I do that. Just unwanted = unsubscribe; unexpected = spam; if unsubscribe link doesn't work or requires logging in => spam.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#330

Post by CJefferson »

BeetleB wrote: post #220
ssivark wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

> Surprising undo model I tend to get surprised by this complaint - especially in the article where undo-tree was recommended as an alternative. Both the Emacs undo and undo-tree are "surprising" models in that very few standard editors support anything beyond the most basics. Personally, I've not had trouble with Emacs's undo (beyond it not visualizing it). Switching to undo-tree may be OK, but it's still surprising…

One small comment, many users do get plugins almost immediately.

If you load a (for example) Java file, a little popup appears saying "Hey, do you want me to download the default Java plugin". Now I can imagine Emacs would find it incredibly hard to pick a "default" plugin to offer users, but it is super helpful to get started.

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