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Toward a “modern” Emacs

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Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#341

Post by sirffuzzylogik »

danShumway wrote: post #84

Do the defaults in Emacs matter, at all? Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and dozens of other default configs already exist. I've been using Emacs for years, I never learned the default keybindings. I used Evil mode right from the start. I just don't see this as a real problem. A small (incomplete) list of real problems: - No timeline on Wayland support, Wayland will likely require substantial work and refactoring. - Performan…

Wayland support is actually being actively worked on. It is done via "native" (no X widgets) GTK support. You can find it on: https://github.com/masm11/emacs

The plan is to get that merged upstream at some point, you can find out more about it on the official mailing lists.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#342

Post by RMPR »

kungtotte wrote: post #326
konjin wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`?

Yup. And iirc it's more discoverable than vimtutor because it's on the first page of the vanilla Emacs

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#343

Post by RMPR »

Mishkun wrote: post #333
zeppelin101 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Emacs for an entire 1 year and I have to say - I only like OrgMode. I've barely tried out Magit, so maybe that's another killer feature. But for programming, I think that Emacs is too steep a hill to climb when VSCode and JetBrains' IDEs offer so much out of the box or just a few clicks/commands away. In Emacs, you can can, in theory, do anything you like. And it is so impressive when you customize it…

Have you tried preconfigured Emacs distributions, like Doom or Spacemacs? You just open your init.el file and uncomment packages you want to enable with pretty good defaults. They have package managers preinstalled too, like straight.el. Also, every package has easy to paste initialization snippet

Found Spacemacs to be slow and buggy, Doom's fine so far though

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#344

Post by djhworld »

I've recently become an "emacs convert", one of those annoying types who are wet behind the ear and have stars in their eyes.

The critical features that have led me down this path have been Org Mode and Doom Emacs, the vim keybindings are what I'm used to and it works well.

Will check in with myself in 6 months or so but so far it's been real joy to use, I develop in Go at work and I've had no issues with the LSP mode or anything and it seems to run pretty performant, even with the largest projects.

I'm not too well versed in everything though but I'm muddling my way through, the menu bar at the bottom when you hit SPC helps a lot.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#345

Post by morelisp »

higerordermap wrote: post #288
morelisp wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not bad. Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End. Get out of the apple cult.

I don't use OS X. I do use Emacs. I don't use CUA. HN has trouble with metaphor.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#346

Post by cpach »

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.

A product doesn’t need to be excellent to be popular. Take for example McDonald’s or Burger King. You will not get excellence there. But you will consistently get a filling meal to a quite good price. Or take TV-series. They don’t need to be excellent either to get lots of viewers. They just need to be available and entertaining.

(I don’t mean this as a critique of VSCode. I have never used it.)

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#347

Post by turing_complete »

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 am using Vim. Is it worth it to try emacs?

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#348

Post by globular-toast »

JacksonGariety wrote: post #4

The Emacs community should start by perfecting lsp-mode so that it can compete with VS Code in terms of functionality. That will simultaneously keep power users from switching AND bring in people from other "easy to use" editors that lack such functionality.

Is the LSP architecture the way to go, though? In my experience it's quite a bit slower than built in emacs modes. I can't use tools that are slower than me.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#349

Post by konjin »

kungtotte wrote: post #326
konjin wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

>Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`?

https://i.stack.imgur.com/egD8V.jpg

That is the splash page that hasn't changed much since 2000. Reading the helpfully highlighted first menu entry do you think that Emacs has a tutorial?

Users who can't even be bothered to read the text in front of them are not an asset to a project that doesn't charge them, they are a liability since they force the project in stupid directions. The death of firefox is a perfect example.

The thing that Emacs should focus on the future is true concurrency. Nice to haves would be a non-gtk gui, adding scheme scripting support and releasing a space cadet mechanical keyboard.

Re: Toward a “modern” Emacs

#350

Post by olejorgenb »

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.

> The biggest advantage of modern IDE is the ease in trying new plugins

I don't think think pasting a few lines[1] into a file can be counted as a huge step? There's built-in UI [2] for installing and configuring packages.

To me the overwhelming advantage of an IDE is good semantic language support out-of-the box. Even having invested quite some time in language-support configuration in emacs I usually use an IDE instead.

> and fuzzy searching makes it easy to find out commands and learn their shortcuts.

This is a package (extension) away in emacs, and there's multiple starter configs which have this out of the box (spacemacs, doom, etc.). IIRC the vanilla experience have prefix completion of commands.

Emacs suffer a bit from having an enormous number of commands which kinda pollute the command-palette-search for everyday use.

Some of the quirky terminology takes some time to get used to (eg.: "open" -> "find")

Overall I find emacs discoverability to be very good and the documentation is comprehensive and well-written.

[1] https://melpa.org/#/getting-started (besides, the elpa repository is available out-of-the box)

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Pa... (admitting you often have to use some elisp for more advanced configuration)

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